Integration to other Feathers

SteveD0

One of my next objectives is to stack the nRF9160 with another feathers board and communicate the data via I2C with a master-slave configuration. The specific board I was thinking to stack with this nRF9160 is the Adafruit M0 Adalogger (or M0 Proto) to pass sensor data to the nRF9160 for cellular communication to a website/cloud site and pass GPS data (and possibly time/date) from the nRF9160 to the Adalogger for logging and display. Do you foresee any issues with this at this time? I’ve read some of nRF forums and there were (I don’t know if they still are) concerns with the different I2C protocols between the nRF9160 and Arduinos, but I didn’t see any issues mentioned with other feather boards. Do you think this will or know this will work with the Adafruit feather boards? I wanted to ask before I mess up a couple boards. Also, are there other integration protocols that could be used to do what I’m thinking if there are still issues with the I2C connection? Are there any precautions I need to take before I move forward that you know of?

SteveD0

I also read that do to some of the differences between RTOS and Arduino that some sensors even if mapped properly to the nRF9160 pins don’t work with RTOS. Have you explored with this? Any thoughts?

jaredwolff

No issues here. I’m using it currently with an external Si7021. Also the on-board RTC is I2C. You can see how to use it in this example. Blog post forthcoming.

SteveD0

Thank you for the examples! I now have a lot to study.

1) I got the external_rtc to compile successfully! The code was fine but in my windows environment in VSC I had to enable to set the kits to load as the included libraries were not being recognized. (see below)

[variant] Loaded new set of variants
[kit] Successfully loaded 1 kits from C:\Users\Steve\AppData\Local\CMakeTools\cmake-tools-kits.json
load kits

2) Also had to make make sure the project in the CMakeList.text was set to project(external_rtc).

3) I’m so new to this environment so I have a few questions: What is a good source to learn more about the VCS debugger? Where do the LOG_INF logs display? I put some printk statements in the code. Where do they display?

jaredwolff

SteveD0 What is a good source to learn more about the VCS debugger?

@SteveD0 did you already get it setup? It should be very similar to any type of graphical debugging interfaces. You set breaks on the left by the numbers (should create a red dot).

SteveD0 Where do the LOG_INF logs display?

The cool thing about Zephyr is you can choose where the logging goes. By default in the nRF9160 Feather, it goes to the USB to Serial interface. You can also select it to go to a different UART interface or even RTT (over the SWD programming lines).

SteveD0 I put some printk statements in the code. Where do they display?

Should go to the same place that LOG_INF, LOG_WRN, LOG_DBG, LOG_ERR goes. The Zephyr docs on logging are great if you’re unfamiliar to a logging system and logging levels.

SteveD0

Hi Jared, Yes I’ve already set up VCS (I’m a first time VCS user) and used it so far to make small code changes and use the terminal console. I just haven’t used the debugger yet which I’ll get familiar with that next.

Also, I was able to use PUTTY to look at the serial port. Thank you!