What can I do with Beagle Connect?

General Discussion
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One of the projects I’m doing sounds like a great application for the Connect. Presently I’ve prototyped it using a Beagle Play. I’m using a QUIIC bus to a bme280 on the i2c bus (tried Mikrobus, found i2c was simpler to get going), and I’ve plugged in an isolated USB-to-rs485 adapter with a submersible pressure sensor. Between the two sensors, I’m monitoring well depth. (Here, for reference.)

Now to establish a long-running test, I need to connect this well test kit to a network, and I’m wondering if I can use the Beagle Connect. I find myself a bit confused by all the different networking technologies that these two devices (Play and Connect) support.

In an ideal world, the application I have in mind would connect wirelessly over approximately 250meters. However there is heavy tree cover. I’d be happy with very low bit-rate, and if somehow a Beagle Connect talking to my Beagle Play could do this, that would be very exciting. Thanks!

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Hi Josh,
This should work well. Ive been working on a very similar use case and results so far have been good. I dont know whether you’ll get that range - I have had reliable connections up to 250m with moderate obstruction (walls, trees, a small hill), but I dont know how your trees will affect it.

I have come up against one brick wall though - the connect cannot now receive incomming packets, though it did at one stage. I’m just about to submit my own question on this, so take a look at that for a very easy quick-start on getting this working. In theory it should just be regular ipv6 networking.

BTW, you said you’re using i2c, but if you need gpio access to the connect pins, I have an overlay I’d be happy to share.

Paul

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In the middle of winter it will not be much of an issue. In the summer with full foliage and rain, not so good. 5ghz will not be very reliable, 2.4 ghz better, the 915 should be fine at that range. That all depends on many factors like antenna and power output, adjacent and co-channel interference. This stuff is extremely hard to predict due to the great number of variables. Best is to build a system and do the testing first to see what the actual demands are.

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4

Sweet. I have myself two of these BeagleConnect Freedom nodes now, though the use-case for now is:

  1. BeaglePlay has custom software, i.e., an OpenTelemetry collector that reads sensors and sends data
  2. BeagleConnect attached to Linux Host, bridging to the Play
  3. Play connects to Linux host using TCP

I can see the potential to use two of these once the BCF vision is complete. The custom software I’ve got is just reading sensors and sending a specific protocol. If the two Connect Freedoms could act instead – one as gateway and one as sensor reader (first mikrobus: atmostpheric pressure, second mikrobus rs-485) – to let me read sensors remotely, then my custom software would run on the Linux host and it would access the two sensors remotely.

I’ll take either of these methods, but for now I’m looking for instructions to setup the first use-case, i.e., a Linux Host and one BCF acting as gateway for a Play running custom software. Thanks!

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