I am building an armor set that is transparent, with LEDs embedded throughout
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The ultimate goal is to have a primary RP2040 connect in my helmet, listening for voice commands. Have a second RP2040 Connect in the chest armor, listening for the triggers from the first RP2040 to initiate different LED transitions based on the voice command.
I was really struggling with the RP2040, which is why I am currently using a FLORA (I am new to C++) as the receiver and LED manager (but it would have to be hard wired to the RP2040 Connect in my helmet, and I dont necessary want a wire connected like that)
I do have this working with the FLORA and 1 RP2040 with a single voice command so far.
Questions:
- Should I keep the FLORA to control the LEDS? Or should I have the second RP2040 do this?
- Is there a better method that I have not thought of?
Bonus question:
- I want to use a nerf gun, to allow people to pull the trigger, and then it will send a signal to the RP2040 controlling the LEDs to do a specific LED pattern, thoughts on best way to do this? I was thinking a reed switch in the nerf gun, and I think that would require yet another rp2040 to send the signal? I feel like I may be overengineering this
Why do you need more than 1 2040?
You havde no power to either the Flora or 2040. Also, you are using SDA but not SCL, that is an I2C bus.
Can you not see if you remove the wire from LED STRIP DIN going to the FLORA and simply place it on the 2040 D5 GPIO17 you eliminate the FLORA.
Apologies on the power oversight, both microcontrollers are being powered by 5V USB through the microUSB on board.
Running the voice command listening and the LEDs from a single RP2040 was what I originally wanted to do, but the issue that I was having is that there was an interruption in the voice command listening every time the RP2040 was triggering the LEDS, which made the board hang. And I could not figure out how to get around that. (Honestly likely because I am still learning all of this so troubleshooting it is difficult)
To mitigate the board hanging, I decided to use a second RP2040 (which right now I am using a FLORA for testing), so that one board just listens for voice commands and sends triggers to the second board that manages the LEDs
Look for the tutorials on the forum related to 'running many things at once', or state machines. Do NOT use delay. I don't know how you know there was an interruption in listening.
I don't know that it is possible, but these are modern MCUs that run at incredible speeds, so my first assumption is that they can do both. Try doing both the right way and see how that goes before bringing in a separate board. The 'light the leds' board could be an esp01, it only needs 1970's power.
Have you looked at using the multi-tasking features to create two tasks on the NANO, each one looks independent but they may run on different cores. See sample sketch Multiple Blinks.
I assume you are basing your code off the tutorial https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/nano-rp2040-connect/speech-recognition-engine/
It looks like all you need to do is replace the LED code with code to control your LED strips. I think that is as easy as creating a local (in your sketch folder) LCD module with the same name that then overrides the library module.
