09-07-2016, 04:15 AM
(09-05-2016, 12:52 PM)Retromachinist Wrote: Hi Yuriy!
i am also interested in using the Quadrature Board with a USB Cable connection
instead of BT, in context of avoiding disconnection issues and preventing interferences.
So would it be possible to just add a UART to USB adapter, and plug it to a tablet?
Or would it be required to program the Board and/or the app differently?
I must say that i may be ok with soldering, but i know near nothing about electronics
or programming...
Best regards and keep up the amazing stuff!
On iGaging and Quadrature versions of the board Tx and Rx pins are broken out to the programming header. The BT modules has an "enable" resistor soldered in that can be removed to disable it. The firmware doesn't care what UART-to-XXX adapter it's sending the data to.
That said, unless your tablet doesn't have BlueTooth, there is no good reason to use USB. The "disconnect issue" happens on a small number of tablets that have a bug in the BT stack. By that I mean the issue where if the connection is dropped on the transmitter end, the tablet fails to reconnect until BT is disabled and re-enabled. The "disconnect issue" where the tablet disconnects while the "Settings" screen is active is a feature: I wrote the code to drop the connection when readout is not used; normally the app will re-connect immediately after returning to the main screen. If that is not happening, I would like to know the details so I can debug it.
When things go wrong with USB (and they go wrong a lot more often because the library is much closer to the "metal") the whole tablet crashes and restarts. Moreover, USB has more interference problems than BT due to the extra ground loop or two.
Regards
Yuriy