Another new plug: the Heading Board.

This one is a pretty odd combination: a 2-axis compass, a barometric pressure sensor, and a thermometer:

It’s based on the HDPM01 module by HopeRF, and the board underneath is just to re-route the pins to the proper headers. As you can see, it barely fits.

Note that this board requires two port headers and sits on top of a JeeNode in the same way as a Room Board. This is necessary, even though the sensor uses I2C, because it also needs two more signal lines: a XCLR control signal, and a 32 KHz clock, i.e. 4 I/I pins in all.

The clock signal is tied to the IRQ line, because this is also the OC2B timer 2 output. So this board ties up timer 2 to generate a 32800 Hz clock, and it interferes with using the IRQ pin (which is shared by all port headers). Furthermore, one of the AIO pins is unused. So it’s a slightly odd fit for the JeeNode, really. Oh, well… soit.

Now let’s try it out.

There’s a new HeadingClass in the Ports library, which handles all the basic logic to access this board.

Here’s the heading_demo.pde sketch to read out the temperature and pressure sensor:

Very simple stuff, given that most of the code is in the HeadingPort class.

Sample output:

I’m not convinced of the accuracy of these sensors. Both the temperature and the pressure values vary a bit, and differ about 0.5% from the readings I see on the Pressure Plug.

Tomorrow, you’ll see why this is called a Heading Board!