The recent weblog post about the BMP085 sensor used on the Pressure Plug sends its readings out to the serial port once a second. It also included a few extra lines of code to send the results wirelessly via the RF12 driver. I added that code to illustrate how easy it is to go from a wired hookup to a wireless hookup with JeeNodes:

Sending it is only half the story – now I need pluck it out of the air again. I could have used the RF12demo sketch with – say – a JeeLink to pick up these transmissions, but then I’d get something like this back:

I.e. 6 bytes of raw data. One way to deal with this is to write some code on the other end of the serial port, i.e. on the receiving workstation, to decode the reported temperature and pressure values. That’s what I’ve been doing with JeeMon on several occasions. Then again, not everyone wants to use JeeMon, probably.

Another way is to simply create a special-purpose sketch to report the proper values. Such as this one:

Sample output:

I used the same format for the output as the “bmp085demo.pde” sketch, but since the two raw data values are not included in the packets, I just report 0’s for them. As you can see, the results is more or less the same as having the Pressure Plug attached directly.

The ACK logic in this sketch looks a bit complicated due to the bit masking that’s going on. Basically, the goal is to only send an ACK back if the sending node requests one. And since we assume that the sending node used a broadcast, we can then extract the sending node ID from the received packet, and send an ACK just to that node.

Tomorrow, I’ll describe how all this can be streamlined and simplified.