Hello, everyone. In this video,
we'll be going over the Mezzanine kit that we've chosen for this course to you primarily.
It is the Sensors Mezzanine for 96Boards.
So, we get a brief overview of what we're going to be doing over.
We will be talking about the Mezzanine.
We will be describing it by looking
at it hands-on and we'll be looking at the different ports,
and then we will be going through each individual sensor,
and then we will talk about the sensor itself, what it does,
and then what you can possibly use it for.
We will be showing how the Mezzanine looks in person.
So, yes. This is the mezzanine that we're using over here.
As you can see here, we will be learning more about this later on.
So here, the ports,
these are actually called growth connectors.
They each come with a little connector like this.
You can just plug them in really easily,
like this, and there you go.
Take it out.
So this is a lot easier than
a normal wiring with a breadboard just because you get the right wire,
cut it to length, and put it in.
There's a bunch of ports here.
These are actual Arduino headers.
This is actually the same alignment as
Arduino UNO so any shield that you can use with the Arduino UNO,
you can use with this.
There's a connectors directly connected to the baseboard of the DragonBoard,
here and there, and there's also these connectors on the side.
These are the digital ones that connect to Arduino,
and these are some of the analog ones here.
As you can see,
this is how it looks on the website where you might buy it.
It shows you each individual sensor and all the connectors what it comes with.
As Simon mentioned on the side,
it has all these cool connectors,
it has Arduino capabilities which we'll discuss later,
and then it comes with a lot of sample projects
that you can install and then run yourselves.
As Andrew mentioned earlier,
there is actually 18 mega-chip
which is essentially what Arduino program we're running on.
It's right on the board,
that's what's connected on all the headers and our coding is you can just upload,
you can put the board on to the DragonBoard and then upload to the Arduino to the UART,
you don't have to use your computer or anything,
just upload into the Arduino,
just do it natively on the DragonBoard.
What's cool at this kit
is that it comes with everything you need to get started with sensors.
There's a buzzer one potentiometer.
We will be going over these more,
but it's just a quick reason why we like it.
There's also a quick start guide for getting set up,
where you need to install,
and even some example projects on their GitHub of cool things you can do.
And so, we can talk more about the Mezzanine.
As we said earlier there's much of ports,
there's five baseboard GPIO ports,
those connected directly to the DragonBoard,
and there's four on the middle right side of it,
right next to Arduino header,
and there's one diode AB,
next to the analog headers.
And those connect directly to the GPIO of the DragonBoard.
There are also five I2C ports.
You can find those on the middle left and also the bottom left side of the board.
And there's five more digital ports specifically coming from the Arduino.
Again, those are the far right,
and three analog ports of the top,
the three on the top left.
There is also two six-pin SPI headers,
and those are the little blue blocks that you can see there.
In addition to those growth connectors,
there's also ports that you are not yet familiar with,
such as a microUSB interface.
This connects directly to the UART,
so you can connect your microUSB right in there,
and then connect another end to your computer.
This is really useful for, let's say,
accessing the board through a CL console.
We will be talking about that more later.
As we've said earlier,
the header is compatible with
an Arduino UNO shield with the little blue headers right there.
Yes. So, if you're a little confused right now,
don't worry, it will clear all this up later.
This is just introducing all the ports on the Mezzanine.
Totally.
The first sensor is the LCD RGB Backlight,
and this allows us to put whatever text we want on the LCD,
so we can put like, "Hello!"
and it all show up on the LCD.
And then on the background,
you can make it whatever color you want.
This could be a very useful and sending you a reminder,
or sending you what time it is maybe,
like a mini clock.
Yes.
The next component is the Smart Relay.
Essentially, this is just allowing you to control a larger,
very possibly dangerous circuit with your smaller DragonBoard circuit.
You would plug in, let's say,
the ground and power to a fridge into the relay on one end,
and then plug in your DragonBoard connector right there.
So, if you tell the relay to be on,
then you can make the circuit connected for the fridge and that'll be on.
That's it. If you're ever want to control
a large electronic devices with your small DragonBoard, this is the way you would do it.
The next sensor is the Buzzer,
and this creates a buzzing sound.
It's very loud where you can't control the sound as well.
This might be used for sending you a notification,
where you might need to go somewhere out,
like a specific time,
or help wake you up maybe.
Oh, boy.
Yes. It will definitely wake you up because of the sound that it makes and yes.
It's horrifying. So, the next one up,
this kind of the opposite of the buzzer.
It takes in sound.
This gives you a relative value of how loud the sound is.
It won't tell you actual decibels,
but this is useful to see if there is a loudest
back and noise at some point or a window breaking possibly,
if you want to add this to a security system.
This is the Touch Sensor.
Basically, what it does is it detects whether you've touched it or not,
and you can use this as a pseudo-button.
We found with the actual button,
there were some issues with it in
terms of what programs you can run with it and what you can't run,
but the touch sensor will always run,
and it basically to text whether you're touching it.
So if you're touching it,
there will be high voltage,
and then when you're not touching it,
it will be low voltage.
And this tells the program that you can touch it,
and then not touch it in a certain amount of time,
and then turn off something or on something.
And this could be used to turn on lights if you're touching it or not, like a switch.
Yes.
So the next one is a Rotary Angle Sensor.
So essentially, that little knob,
if you turn it a bit,
it changes the value that outputs, and from that,
you can try to figure out what angle it's turned to.
For those of you that are familiar circuits,
this is also known as a potentiometer.
But if you're not familiar with that,
don't worry about it, just think of it as it tells you the angle.
So some uses for this is a button or a sensor,
you only have like one input whether it's on or off, for this,
you can give it some varying values from 0 to 180 to see like,
"Oh, I want to add like 10 hours instead of 12 hours."
It won't just go from 0 or 12 hours.
You can have some midway.
So, the next one is Temperature and Humidity Sensor.
This is pretty self-explanatory.
It gives you two values, temperature,
and humidity, and this might be used for just tracking the weather.
And then just maybe you want to do some data analysis on the weather,
just your personal methods,
you can just track your temperature and humidity,
and do your cool stuff with it.
The next one is, again,
if you fill the circuits, I'm sure you know what this is.
It's just a simple LED.
There is a little-added benefit is that the little screw on it.
You can adjust the sensitivity of it,
so the higher the knob turned,
then the harder it is to turn LED because it's more resistance,
and the last one it's more sensitive,
so it gets better with less voltage.
For those of you who might not be familiar with LEDs,
it's just the light.
Yes.
You do tilt it to head on and hola, there's lights.
So yes, you might want to use this to just
give you some feedback whether or not you're program is running right,
or you want to light something up,
maybe not, it's kind of weak,
but if you wanted to.
The next one is a Light Sensor,
and it's the opposite of the LED.
It detects whether there's a light or not,
and this could be useful to track motion, let's say.
If you just hover your hand over it where there's light,
and then the light sensor will detect less light than it did before.
And then once you move your hand away from it, there will be more light.
This could be used for detecting whether something went over to light sensor,
like it turns up the view from the light sensor,
and yes, this could be used for
just surveillance purposes whatever you want to do with it.
The last one is a very simple Button.
So this works similar to the touch sensor, but yes,
it just connects, you touch it, and it connects to circuit,
and basically just tells you one or zero, whether it's on or off.
It's on when you press it,
and it's off when it's not pressed. So, yes.
And then there's the Mini Servo and this basically allows something to rotate,
and you can program how much it rotates.
And this could be useful for,
you can create something like a helicopter maybe.
You just want to see how a helicopter might look through the circuit itself,
and you can just put a little propeller,
and then it'll just twirl around.
Maybe not with this servo because it didn't spin that fast,
but you can make it look like a helicopter.
Yes, but that's basically the idea.
You can you can turn things.
Yes.
There are more resources in the reading section about the Sensors Mezzanine,
and about how to get to the GitHub,
so look out for that in the sources.
So take away, it allows for easy access to the sensors and the actuators.
The actuators are the things that react like a Mini Servo,
the LED, these are the actuators and sensors.
They're pretty self-explanatory.
They just sense whatever you want it sense.
Yes, taking data from the world.
There are a variety modules in this kit,
and this basically allows you to do anything you want.
There's so much, but there is a limit because it's not all this instant you possibly get,
but it's a pretty good variety to get started with your projects.
