Configuring micro-controller WiFi with Android phone’s LED flash

Introduction

The “Gazerbeam” library enables configuring micro controller’s Wi-Fi network name (SSID) and password (PSK) using a LED flash of Android phone, etc.

• The phone needs APP to blink configuration information, the example Android Java application named “blinky”.
• A phototransistor is connected to a micro-controller with simple high pass filter/digitalization electronics.
• Micro-controller gets digital input signal from electronics. It is set up so that changes to the signal trigger interrupt. Gazerbeam library handles this and converts it to the message.
• The transferred data is encoded into the light signal using short and long intervals between the light on/off changes

Android application

Android application is simple: To provide user form to fill in wifi network name, password and other optional configuration settings. When user fills these in and clicks “blink” button, the app starts sending this data repeatedly with LED flash until the “blink” button is clicked again.

The android application’s Java code is in iocom/extensions/gazerbeam/examples/blinky directory.

Electronics

200318, updated 20.3.2020/pekka

An LM6144 operational amplifier (U1 and U2) is used to high pass and to digitize the signal of LXD/GB3-A1ELS phototransistor (Q1).

The U2 is a comparator, which compares if the input voltage is less or greater than 1.65 V changes the voltage to 0V or 3.3V (roughly) Resistor R5 adds a threshold to change output state, to prevent output from filtering. In addition, there is mild low pass filtering by RC circuit C3/R4.

Signal and data encoding

An Android phone can only turn flash on or off, the shortest pulse which can be reliably generated is approximately 10ms. This is enough, the amount of data to be transferred is small. Typically WiFi network name and password, and optionally some extra information.

Zero and one bits
When sending Android’s LED keeps on turning on and off continuously. What matters is how long LED stays in the same state: 10ms for “0” bit and 20 ms for “1” bit. So the time between transitions matters, the direction of transition is ignored. It doesn’t matter if LED switches from on to off or vice versa.

The Gazerbeam receiver is not very time-critical, timing can be changed quite much and it should still work. Pulse length is recorded on fly and basic rule is that “1” must be clearly longer than “0”. Anyhow if taken very far from tested, the high pass filtering RC may need to be adjusted.

From bits to messages
A message contains all data that the user entered and is repeated endlessly: The android application doesn’t know when it is received by micro-controller.

• The message starts with 14 zero bits and then one bit, like “000000000000001”.
• Then the 7 data bit for each data byte follow, least significant bit first.
• The data transferred is 7 bit ASCII with legimate values from 1 to 127, it can never form nine consequent zeros and can be separated from beginning of message. Like “0101010”.
• There is no message length. Previous message is processed when a new message begins, at that point the previous message is considered “ready”.
• First three data bytes contain always checksum (MODBUS CRC), less significant byte first. First byte contains 6 least significant bits + 1, next byte 6 bits + 1 and the third byte 4 bits + 1.

From bits to messages
The message starts with three-byte checksum. This needs to be generated by the Android code and is checked and stripped away by the Gazerbeam library.

Following the checksum there are 1 or more fields:

• A field starts with field id byte.
• Next byte is field data length, specifies the number of data bytes.
• N data bytes

Using the library

Data types and functions
The Gazerbeam receiver structure holds settings and the current state of monitoring phototransistor signal.

• Initialize gazerbeam structure and set pin to monitor.
• Poll for new received messages.

The library source code
The source code is located in /coderoot/iocom/extensions/gazerbeam directory.

Building the library
How to build the library depends on the target platform and tools used. Cmake builds are quite straight forward, there is CMakeLists.txt in the root directory, which can be opened for example in QT creator.

• Cmake: Either build project separately or include it as subproject within in your project
• ESP32/Arduino/Platform IO. Copy files. Configure platformio.ini.

Include headers and link library with your project
The path iocom/extensions/gazerbeam should be added to your project build. This allows including the library headers by “#include “gazerbeam.h”.

Dependencies
The gazerbeam depends on some libraries

• eosal – platform/operating system abstraction
• pins – portable access to IO pins
• iocom – some data types, not really much needed but dependency is there.

HW support

• Tested on ESP32/Arduino/PlatformIO environment.
• To port to other hardware, the HW support needs to be implemented in eosal and pins libraries.

Testing and prototyping hints

I am a C coder, an only hobbyist in electronics. So I draw any analog electronics design with partsim, (free online tool) and run simulation it. Next I test the setup on a breadboard, as in the picture below. Components I like to buy from AliExpress and keep extras at home.

Once ready to make a “product”, which often is just hobby project: I start to think about dimensions, connectors, transients and finally open Eagle CAD (AutoDesk, free for home projects) to and draw the design. I still use an old laser printer, heat transfer paper, iron, and Ferro-chloride. With care and enough time it is possible to make quite nice PCB, although sending Eagle CAD file to China would yield better quality and be perhaps more cost-effective.