Contents

The Plan

We now have some network designs and an initial library.  These networking schemes will be discussed in some detail and we will begin implementing portions of this network as well as add more hardware.  The plan:

• Discuss Networks
• Eliminate down to 1 final Project Possibility
• Discuss Sonar, Photoresistor and Pushbutton
• Specify Network Structure
• Specify Debug Tracer
• Specify Simple Testing Scheme

Discussion

We have candidate network designs put together in isolation from last week.  It will be fun to see these and see if we can blend them down to a single networking approach.  We can try to handle difficult cases we can dream up and tests for how to unit test basic functionality.  We also need to characterize how we will understand whether each of these network functions will be tested. 

We also need to isolate our final project outcomes or products.  This "voting from the island" will likely be obvious based on constraints and our increased understanding of the networking issues.  This will be voted on and hopefully the result will be obvious. 

By now, we will start to understand how many nodes we can expect to facilitate, how things move around the network, and any hard limits in terms of routing, proximity, etc.  As we learn, we will constantly revisit our candidate designs and adjust based on what we have learned. 

Lab

We can continue with our soldering to complete the initial 3 hardware elements, the LED's and the voltage monitor.  We will also add the photoresistor and can also discuss and demonstrate the sonar ranger and push button to see if they fit our project needs. 

Assignment

Since we got a library last week, the library will be shared with the group and everybody will use it to report the battery voltage, blink the red LED and blink the yellow LED with a frequency based on the input from the photoresistor's input. 

In addition to this basic test of our initial library, we will diverge again with the following tasks assigned to individual teams:

• Basic IR Network Trace Logging to a Host (sniffer)
• Additional Hardware Library Additions
• Initial Network Implementation
• Initial Network Test Harness

These are not exactly balanced tasks but we will do our best to share the easy tasks with earlier victors (from the network design) and help out the network implementation group as this will be more intense. 

Revision History:

• 2009-01-07: Initial Post
• 2009-01-28: Some small revisions to match where we are

Related Links:

Resource Collection for the 407/507 Winter 2009 course

Main page for the University of Oregon Winter 2009 407/507 course

How To: Connecting a Photoresistor