Hi all,

While we're waiting for our first batch of PCB's to come in, I wanted to start going over out software plan with you.

In our first update, Update #0, we talked about our goals which you can see below:

Goals:

• Allow for communication between two different boards
• Offload the communication between boards to the SAO
• Create an TV remote design to encapsulate the chosen parts
• Learn how to create a circuit for infrared components
• Learn how to use KiCAD

While these are overall goals for the project, we also have some specific software goals:

Software Goals:

• Leave the IR Protocol complexity to the SAO
• Simple i2c commands 
  • Ideally this is can be done with just three main commands: Get Data, Send Data, Change Configuration
• Make sure that programming the ATTiny85 is not overly complex
• Possible future features:
  • Board ID's to ignore transmissions from unintended boards
  • Retransmission of messages that were not correctly received

With this in mind, we want to use ATTinyCore as our go-to Arduino core. This is done for a couple reasons:

• Allows for most standard Arduino functions
  • Ideally makes it easy for us and others to program
• Can use I2C Wire commands for easy I2C implementation
• Lots of documentation and example projects
• Continually updated and recently updated

We also want to use Arduino-IRremote as out IR Protocol library. This was done as:

• Support for many different IR Protocols
• Support for many ATTiny boards
• Small library version (necessary for small 8k memory on ATTiny85)
• Continually updated and recently updated

As we get closer to programming our ATTiny85, here's a YouTube video we're following to program it: