Hi there,
I am using several DF Robot SEN0395 mmRadar sensors to control an interactive art installation. The sensors are placed up in the air only reachable from ladders but I need to be able to tweak them via the Arduino IDE once they are installed.
Can I use a D1 Mini ESP8266 Arduino WiFi Board, hardwire it to the mmRadar sensor and then communicate with the sensor from some 15 feet away from my laptop? Can I basically establish a Wifi connection between my laptop and the Arduino Wifi-board and then work with the Wifi-board the same way I would use a “traditional” Arduino connected via USB and program the mmRadar sensor?
Can I use several of those Wifi-boards, one for each sensor, give them different IP-addresses and then use them as a programming tool for the mmRadar sensor one at a time?
Is a Wifi-board the best way to this?
If yes, is the D1 Mini ESP8266 Arduino WiFi Board a good solution? Other board options?
If no, is there a Bluetooth solution? If yes, any board recommendation.
The schematic just shows a basic potential setup for Wifi…
Thank you for your help in advance!
Erwin
Hi! Considering no one has jumped in this thread in almost a whole day, I´ll tell you how I would try to tackle this problem.
The SEN0395 mmRadar sensor uses serial comms (Rx/Tx) at 115200 baud rate. So, using software serial UART might not be reliable. This is the only reason I believe the D1 mini would be a poor choice. I would choose boards with 2 or 3 hardware UARTs (see ESP32 models).
All the boards might be programmed to have OTA (over-the-air uploading of sketches).
Wi-fi seems to be the best choice, but I'm not a web/IP guy, so I would choose ESP-NOW (which is also wi-fi, but easier to deal with) to read the sensors from 15 feet away. This would require another ESP32 connected to the laptop to receive all the others data. Toggling between OTA and ESP-NOW might not be simple to program.
OTA and data transfer can also be done by BLE, but that goes beyond my current capabilities.
Thank you!
Just to clarify: programming the SEN0395 radar is easily accomplished from the Arduino board currently connected to my laptop via USB. My aim is to basically replace the USB-Arduino board with a Wifi-Arduino board like the ESP8266 which then talks to the mmRadar sensor. The aim is then to multiple this basic setup and have the laptop talk to several Wifi-Arduino / mmRadar combos. I hope my schematic makes this clear…
What was not clear to me is wether you want at distance:
- just to read the sensor output;
- to send commands to the sensor and change parameters;
- to updat “firmware” by uploading new sketches OTA;
- all of the above.
Goal: Basically “just” changing the sensors’ parameters by uploading new sketches OTA aka updating the sensors’ firmware. This would only happen during the test run of the installation not during normal operation…
Thx!
