Hello! I am a noob in the maker world and to udoo neo. I am interested in using the board to collect data (temperature, dissolved oxygen, electrical conductivity, etc). I came across the Tentacle Shield which is an Arduino Shield designed for 5V compliant Arduino. Is this compatible with the udoo neo? I read in the udoo neo docs that udoo neo instead works at 3.3V logic. Could I still run this shield? If not, would the Mini Tentacle Shield be a viable option (it runs at 3.3V or 5V)? Thank you for your help!
Both shields are using I2C as communication (the big shield also serial) so they only are using 2 pins from the Neo for communication and 5V/3.3V/GND for power. Big shield: You can use a logic level converter to be sure nothing gets damaged. Do not plug in the big shield directly on the Neo but use a intermediate breadboard. For serial it is connected to the incorrect pins 10/11, the Neo uses pins 0/1 (Serial0). So you have to rewire them if you use serial. The sketches also have to be rewritten because they use SoftwareSerial that is not yet supported by the Neo. The I2C uses the correct SDA/SDL pins but because of the 5V I would advise to use the Logic Level Converter on the big shield for I2C communication. Perhaps you wil have to rewrite some sketches to select the correct wire/wire1 object. I think the Mini Shield will fit directly. Perhaps you wil have to rewrite some sketches to select the correct wire/wire1 object. But cost wise I suppose you better use the big shield if you want to measure more than 2 values.
Thank you @waltervl for explaining the details and providing suggestions! The goal of my project is to collect data, write it into a csv file, and upload it to the cloud. What I have in mind is collect the data through the big tentacle shield (I am collecting from 4 sensors) --> communicate with the M4 core through I2C --> have the M4 core write into a csv file onto the ubuntu side (A9 core), where I will have installed dropbox. I definitely feel there has to be a more streamlined way to do this. Maybe cut out ubuntu (A9) from the steps and just go M4 straight to the cloud? I am just trying to figure out which shields and tools to get first. Also I know Arduino has an SD Library, through which you can create/edit files into an SD card but I am under the impression I cannot use this library to write into the SD card that is running the Neo (due to Neo's different architecture?). Maybe I'm bitting off too much on my first try but I am excited learn this and figure it out! Thanks for help!
If you are only using I2C you can also skip the arduino part, read the values with for example Python and store them on the SD and in the cloud.
Cool! I typed python on the command line and got the program running, or so it seems. I found this playlist on how to program in python so I guess I'm learning python! I guess I'll have to start a separate board since I seem to be steering the conversation away from the board's topic hehe. If you have any suggestions please let me know! Also I got the brick temperature sensor working and I'm getting outputs! Woohoo! I will practice my python programming with this before diving into the Tentacle Shield! Currently I read the output of the brick through /dev/ttyMCC Thanks for the help!
If you also are going to combine other sensors and have some steering on it later, it perhaps could be better to start with the Arduino part too. Please check out my How-to's : HOW TO: Make Udoo Neo an IoT Gateway of Sensors How-To: Control Neo Arduino from Web page They make use of Arduino and Python so could give you an impression how to combine things For programming python I like the pre-installed Geany, an IDE that can interpret Python (among a lot of other languages) There are three ways you can run a (Python) program in Geany: Build > Execute Press F5 Click the icon with three gears on it
