Controlling pixelblaze over serial or similar wired connection

Ideas and Tips
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Hi, I’m wondering if anyone has any examples on sending data into pixelblaze from another microcontroller.

I’m playing with the little ESP cam, a rp2040 with a colour sensor and a full blown openMV cam with object detection. The idea is to send colour and or movement to pixelblaze for a wearable. Some of these have wifi and I’ve been successful with websockets to send an array of colours. But wondering if there’s a lower power way of wiring my microcontroller to a digital input and sending the same sort of data. (and I can’t get my hands on the openMV wifi expansion board)

I’m tempted to get as far as sending a couple of hundred data points at a time for the crudest video you’ve ever seen

How would this be consumed on the PB side? what would I need to emulate on my output side? Would it work at the same time as the sensor board or does that tie up the digital inputs?

Any thoughts or related examples are appreciated, thanks!

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Not as of yet, though you can emulate the sensor board data packet to send data that will show up in any of those variables.

@JeffJeffGlassGlass did exactly that for a cool LoRa DMX bridge thing for a show. Some background on his youtube:

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Thanks for the insight, I want to both use the accelerometer and this external data, so I might use the 5 ADC channels that I get with the sensor board to send the 5 most significant colours from my camera. A bit of noise from the DAC-DAC conversion is just going to add some extra spicy.

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4

I’m also looking to control a pixelblaze from an arduino. If i were to trick the blaze into thinking its getting info from the sensor expansion board could i still use an actual sensor expansion board?
Another option ive been considering is to use two or more analog input pins on the blaze connected to arduino analog out pins. But it seems like an awkward solution.

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@robotopdx, I’ve not tried building a sensor board passthrough, but it should be doable if you’ve got an Arduino fast enough to run two 115,200bps serial lines while still doing whatever other hardware I/O you have in mind. The sensor board packets are small - around 104 bytes - but they arrive at a rate of about 40 per second.

You’d set up one up a serial port to receive data from the real sensor board, then modify the incoming packet as needed and send the data on to the Pixelblaze through the other serial port.

The sensor board’s source code with protocol and packet descriptions lives here: GitHub - simap/pixelblaze_sensor_board

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Here’s a library for reading the sensor board data.

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