Introduction

With help from guest Author, Barry Byford

I am sure you are all wondering… What happened in this week’s OpenHours?! Especially for those who missed the live call, this blog will hopefully outline the entire episode and provide all the promised resources mentioned during the episode. For anyone interested in recreating our featured guest’s project, you will surely find everything you need here.

That being said, this week we spoke with Barry Byford! An amazing 96Boards (more specifically dragonboard 410c) enthusiast who came to us all the way from England. After announcements (see below for announcements) and taking a look back at last week’s episode, we went right into introductions.

As mentioned, Barry came to us via OpenHours conference call from England, where he lives. In the beginning of the episode, Barry spoke to us about himself, explaining how he ended up getting involved with 96Boards and the dragonboard 410c. For a long time now, it has been a goal to get Bluetooth ® wireless technology Low Energy usable on Linux Single Board Computers from within the Python programming language to interact with peripheral devices. Barry explained about some of the false starts he has had with this goal although with this project good progress seems to have been made to his goal.

“Project BIG Button” on OpenHours

Barry shared with us how he does STEM outreach to get the next generation interested in digital making. Being able to communication with multiple Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices has lots of very practical application although the main goal Barry had for this build was to use as a way to talk about BLE to students.

Pre-requisites

dragonboard 410c
- The default version of BlueZ on Debian Jessie is 5.23. This project requires the version of BlueZ D-Bus API that is in BlueZ 5.43 release so you will need to upgrade. There are more detailed instructions on how to upgrade available at http://bluezero.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install_bluez.html
- Debian Stretch should come with BlueZ 5.43 version as standard.
- Python3 is a requirement for this project along with the guizero and pydbus libraries. Both can be installed with ‘sudo pip3 install ’
Micro:bit
- For this project we used a pre-built image that exposes all the interesting micro:bit Bluetooth services. The pre-built image is available from the Bitty Software http://www.bittysoftware.com/downloads.html#microbit_blue website. We used the version that does not require pairing because we valued simplicity over security for this project.
Please see “Instructions” section of blog to find full Bill of Materials for project.

Instructions

Using a 96Boards dragonboard 410c, several micro:bit microcontrollers, a driver board, some BIG buttons and various miscellaneous wires and tools, this set of instructions will walk you through setting up your very own BIG Button Game! This particular application focuses on the use of both onboard Bluetooth modules (dragonboard and micro:bit) as well as Python for the base programming language.

Instructions to recreate “Project BIG Button” can be found here

Resources

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