This project was part of my internship at Dazzletek in Breda. They no longer exist and the name “Dazzletek” now seems to belong to an American company. They created intelligent lighting control solutions and were part of Vitelec. My assignment was to create a prototype that would allow a device to communicate over Wi-Fi. I worked with a PIC microcontroller.
I developed a software program using C in the OpenAT framework, but also made adjustments to the hardware prototype board. At the end of my internship the prototype was realized into an extension board for the Antares gateway. The purpose of this assignment was to provide a device which communicates over GPRS, with the ability to communicate that data over Wi-Fi.
Instead of using the Wi-Fi stack, I was encouraged to develop my own data transfer logic over SPI, which was then read by the oscilloscope.
Technology
The WF121 by BlueGiga, which used a PIC32 microcontroller, had to be programmed to accept and transfer data to a specific SSID. Also the AirPrime SL6087 by Sierra Wireless (now Semtech) had to be programmed to relay the data to the Wi-Fi module.
I used Wireshark, commandline debug and an oscilloscope to monitor the datatranfers. Version control was done in Subversion.
Finally, all the boards had to be provided with the firmware I wrote. I soldered a little RJ45 connector that would allow the PIC programmer to write to the pins on the boards.
