Infrared Communication SAO

Hello all,

This update is to list some of the components and reasoning behind them.

To start, we chose an ATTINY85 as our microcontroller. This was chosen for the following reasons:

• Cheap
• Plentiful
• Supports 5V Vcc
• Supports I2C
• More than minimum of 4 I/O pins
• Lots of good documentation online
• Arduino library compatible

We also decided some of the specs for our IR LED and Receiver. After some research, it seems that 38KHz is the standard carrier frequency and 940nm is a standard wavelength. Other than being the standard specs for IR communication, we don't have any reason to choose these specs. We'll show how we calculate the max communication distance in a future update.

One thing to note about our parts is that we're trying to choose through-hole parts. This is done as we want anyone to be able to assemble one themselves. This goes against the SAO Connector Contest's guidance but we are selecting through hole parts with SMD replacements in mind. We're keeping the part list simple to make this conversion easy and our plan is to hand these out at Hackaday Supercon LA so we don't want to spend too much money. We'd rather an easy to assemble by hand kit with larger parts that can be replaced with anything someone might have on hand for the initial version.

Parts List:

• https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technology/ATTINY85-20PU/735469
• https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/rochester-electronics-llc/QED233A4A0/11538768
• https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/vishay-semiconductor-opto-division/TSOP58238/4695679

Hello all,

This update is to explain what our goals were for this project. 

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

We've already started picking out components for this project, the next update should be soon!