Hey! I'm Nathan

3 Part Project

Part One: LabView

The LabView component required a user input for a search word, and 4 different recipe details to be able to be scrolled through by the user on the front panel. I approached this using a case-structure (the cases being provided by a Enum ring with values 1 thru 4). However, the cases were piggy-backed onto each other. For example, case 1 would be the first instance of "title, href, ingredients", but case 2 would be the first instance after case 1, and case 3 would be the first instance after case 2 after case 1. If this were to be expanded, the running time for the program would definitely be negatively affected.

I wanted to cut down reliance on live updates for the Arduino component of the project, so I opted to create 12 separate tags on SystemLink (3 tags for each of the 4 cases). Due to this choice, I could not "write" to each tag in each case structure. Instead, I had to recreate the entire piggy-back method all over again just to be able to update all the tags.

Below is a screenshot of my LabView code. The case-structure (circled in blue) is neat and manageable, but the SystemLink and ThingWorx writing portion is clunky and inefficient (circled in red). Click the image to view the full-size render. View a demo of the front panel here. Download my code here.

Part Two: Arduino

The Arduino component required essentially a physical manifestation of the LabView front panel. In order to display all of the information (titles, ingredients, hyperlinks) separately, I made use of a "scroller" integer variable. This variable has 2 digits, and the first digit defines which of the 4 recipes is being selected, while the second digit defines which information to display. For example, scroller == 11 displays the title of recipe 1, while scroller == 32 displays the ingredients of recipe 3. A push on the joystick up or down would change the scroller value by 10 (with an exception at the "ends", where it loops back instead), and a push on the joystick right or left would change the scroller value by 1 (again with an exception at the "end"). Here's a small illustration that may help.

In order to speed up responsiveness, the tag values from SystemLink are only acquired once at the start of the program. In order to update tag values, the reset button must be pressed. This is better than the alternative, which is to wait for 30 seconds between each joystick push. I began toying with the idea of using the touch sensor as a refresh button for the user, but I ran out of time to implement it.

Printing on the OLED was pretty straightforward. In order to avoid printing "off" the screen, a for-loop was used, where every 13th character in the printed string would reset the "cursor" to the left and increment downwards. The void loop() constantly updates to read the joystick input and print each case according to the scroller value. As a bonus feature, pressing down on the joystick displays the word used in the user's search. Much of the U8G2 code I used was recycled from the previous Bus Catcher project.

I was able to avoid the network issues I had previously by using my personal hotspot. Since the tags are only updated once, I was able to shut off the hotspot once the program started running to save on data.

View my Arduino code below or visit it here.