Been working on a few changes to some lightbar projects to add or improve WiFi capability. Also replaced cabled ethernet in MechanicTony’s Dual_Basic with Wifi. The repo’s are public in case someone might find them useful.
In my setup, I use a Toughpad which also acts as a WiFi AP. It shares out a USB tether from my phone for NTRIP data. This makes the entire setup only need power to each device and eliminate a lot of wiring in the cab. Also makes placement of the components more flexible.
I am looking at using hologram.io for data since my Toughpad has a builtin cellular card. Hologram is pretty cheap IoT access. The platform fee is $0.70 per SIM per month ($8.40/yr) and data is $0.08 per MB. A typical day of use in field for me is about 500 KB so it might be worth it to eliminate another cable.
The M5StickCplus is a neat solution to creating a light bar. It is $22 on Mouser and a meter of self-stick weatherproof LED’s is $14. Makes for a nice plug and play lightbar setup. In addition to the lightbar, it also displays the CM deviation from the track on the LCD display.
Some of these projects were ported from Arduino IDE to VSCode. I like Arduino IDE but VSCode / PlatformIO provided direct integration with Github and easier inclusion of external libraries. The “squiggles” feature is really nice since it highlights errors before even trying to compile. It saved me a bunch of time. Also, VSC makes it easy to “clean” the pre-compiled cache. This was very helpful when tracking down and issue with the WiFi code.