eppfel / DigiMerkki

ESP Mesh Bonding Interaction

This project automatically connects several ESP32 or ESP8266 in range into a WiFi mesh. Through touch input devices can display and exchange pictures, show synchronised visualizations and track peoples face-to-face interactions.

Dependencies

• Painless Mesh (for connecting the ESPs into a mesh)
• TFT_eSPI (for controlling the display on the TTGO T-display board)
• eppfel/EasyButton (Custom Fork) (Button debounce and abstraction)
• eppfel/ArduinoTapTempo (Custom Fork) (To set beat from taps)
• ESP Mesh Badge Protocol (shared protocol specifications)
• Deprecated: CapacitiveSensor (for ESP8266 touch sensing)

Hardware

Boards

The current implementation was implemented and tested on the TTGO T-display (ESP32 dev module).

Other ESP32 boards are not supported anymore but could be by removing the calls to the TFT display.

ESP32 does only connect to 2.4GHz bands

Periphery / Schematic

The program expects two capacitive touch buttons to be attached. Further, RGB LEDs are connected through 3.3V. See pin definitions in the header file for the layout.

Setup

All boards can immediately join the mesh without further setup or any electronics, but I/O is limited to the hardware buttons and display.

T-display

This board does not feature an on-board LED, so an external has to be attached, to show connectivity. Further this board controls its integrated display.

Build Process

1. You need platformio installed. I suggest https://platformio.org/platformio-ide (Arduino IDE does not support the build flags)
2. Clone this repository to your machine. git clone [e-mail]:digi-haalarit/esp-mesh-bonding-interaction.git
3. Open this repository in your platformio IDE (e.g. Visual Studio Code) or in your terminal cd esp-mesh-bonding-interaction
4. Run the build task in your IDE or platformio run in terminal (platformio automatically installs the dependencies on the first run)

Upload procedure

Depending on the goal there are different ways to upload the software onto the ESP32 board.

Upload precompiled app with esptool

If you have a compiled binary, you only need the esptool to upload the board.

1. Install python and esptool, if it is not already in your machine.
2. Check the port you want to upload to (e.g. /dev/cu.usbserial-01E063F5, you can get device with pio device list)
3. Run esptool.py --port /dev/cu.usbserial-01E063F5 write_flash 0x10000 DigiMerkkiApp.bin (With replacing the port and the correct path to esptool.py)

Upload from source inside Visual Studio Code

1. Set upload port in platformio.ini (you can get device with pio device list)
2. OPTIONAL: Run Erase flash (This deletes all data on the board and is needed for a clean start)
3. Run Upload
4. OPTIONAL: Run Upload filesystem image (This will delete files changed by the app, i.e. configuration.json and interactionlog.json. Hereafter the app also initialises the configuration.)

Working with multiple boards you can make use the scripts uploadall.sh or eraseandupload.sh to perform the upper steps for multiple boards. Just edit value of ports to filter /dev/cu.usbserial-* all boards connected to vis USB.

Other boards not supported anymore

Huzzah32

At this point the Huzzah supports to control NeoPixel through FastLed library.

Huzzah 8266

The feather with ESP8266 needs a <500 OHM resistor between two pins to sense capacititce touch but is not supported at the moment.