Conceptual Question

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I am thinking about making a 1 sq inch PCB that has an LED with a frosted glass cover that is wired for capacitive touch. The goal is to allow for a daisy chain them together into a matrix. Each PCB would have a micro processor on it with the goal of accepting and receiving transmissions where the first board is connected to the TX of the host controller and the last board is connected to the RX of the host controller. This would allow for the boards to self address when the host commands to allow for addressing for single unit LED changes or receiving touch events. This means that each micro processor needs to have a message queue to accept and pass along new or non-applicable messages.

Conceptually how would I create a high speed data input and create a queue for passing messages on and potentially inserting messages. I would like to stick with an Arduino based project for simple open source development, but not sure if it is flexible enough. I would prefer to see 256kbps data rates or faster for theoretical response.

Once I have a bit more decided, I will post some drawings/highlights.

Thanks!

Frank

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Mitch Resnick at the MIT Media lab did something like this in the 1999-2000 timeframe with intelligent lighting used as jewelry, etc. I remember a demo he gave at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and it was really cool. I’m pretty sure all the documentation is still available on one of MIT’s sites.

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If the MCU does have the correct features (2xSPI or 2xI2C), you could probably set one as master and one as slave. If you only have one, it should still be possible to use SPI and switch between master and slave as necessary.