Overview

In this guide we’re going to integrate an INNOVASEA Rx-LIVE acoustic animal tag receiver into our Bristlemouth Dev Kit. This receiver communicates via a Half-Duplex RS485 protocol, and this guide serves as a great example for integrating Half-Duplex devices. You should already have gone through Bristlemouth Dev Kit Guide 5: Developing a Simple Application and Bristlemouth Dev Kit Guide: Integrating an RS232 Serial Sensor in detail, as we will build on the concepts from those guides.

This integration was done by @Eric Stackpole, who documented his process and progress in a Bristlemouth Community Forum thread.

This guide will cover:

• Physically configuring the Bristlemouth Dev Board to connect to an RS-485 half-duplex sensor.
• Using the Payload UART ‘transactions’ feature to manage half-duplex communications.
• Using the LineParser class to implement a more advanced serial protocol parser.
• Using a robust old-school single-threaded state machine to control a more complex sensor.

<aside> 📖 For more technical detail and open source schematics of the Dev Board hardware, checkout the Downloads ****section of our Technical Documentation.

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<aside> ⏳ Expect to take at least a few hours to complete this guide, and possibly more depending on how familiar you are with your sensor of choice.

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Before starting this guide, make sure you have completed Getting Started Guides 1 through 5.

If you want to follow along with the exact hardware integration in this guide, in addition to your Bristlemouth Dev Kit you’ll need:

• An INNOVASEA Rx-LIVE receiver [link to INNOVASEA’s product page].
• A Micro Circular 8-pin Female cable assembly to connect to the sensor. We’re using one from MacArtney [link to MacArtney product page], but there are several vendors who provide compatible cable assemblies.
• A complete demo Mote application and the documentation from INNOVASEA are available in the Bristlemouth protocol GitHub repository in src/apps/bm_devkit/rx_live_example.

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