This was after taking some advice from coolcomponents.com (uk) on the best way to achieve taking positional data from a viola player for a music composition/performance.
I’m having real trouble with connecting the adxl345 to the xbees and after a couple of weeks of fairly fruitless searching and experimenting and stubbornly trying to do it myself, I now could really do with some help as my deadline is seriously looming!
I’m fairly confident that I have the xbees setup correctly (using xctu, although I can’t get the range test to work at all. Big aside now but last night I accidently plugged the xbee into the usb explorer with the bottom pins not connected and all the others in the wrong connections by one, and the range test worked, wth!).
Can someone please walk me through how to setup the adxl345 hardware and software? I have some limited experience with arduino’s, and kinda wish I had stayed within arduino as there seems to be lots of code floating around for that setup, but am otherwise pretty new to all this.
Being somewhat new to this it is rather frustrating to hear that adxl345 cannot connect directly to the xbee’s. Like many people, I presume, with things like this I will trust the advice given by experts and then wade into it and attempt to figure out what’s going on as I progress.
So in this instance it was the advice from coolcomponents.co.uk (apologies for giving the wrong address) that led me to this purchase. I will contact them directly and ask for some after-sales support, as I have had no response from their mailing list.
I would very much like to garner some responses from the active community as well though…
I have read the spec sheet for the adxl345 but tbh I am not really sure what I’m doing so most of it is outside of my current knowledge.
I do like to think that I am reasonably quick on the uptake but perhaps it may help if I say now that I am a music composer, mainly working with software rather than hard/wet ware.
So this piece is a new process for me. I am working with a musician who performs on a viola d’amore, an unusual member of the viol family. In the piece I wish to attach a sensor to the head of the instrument which will measure the acceleration of his movements as he plays. Thus the sensor needs to be both lightweight and wireless. The data will then be sent into a patch within the music software program Pure Data, with the x,y,z, data being used to manipulate certain aspects of the electronic audio processing that accompanies the composition.
After some discussion with fellow Pd users I believe that the xbee’s provide a reliable solution at a reasonable price. Several fellow composers mentioned that bluetooth, for example, tends to fail, and fail completely, under stage conditions. So the reliability was the main reason for going with the xbees.
I also do enjoy exploring new technologies and this seemed like it might be fun too:)
Ok, the new link does show the products, XBee & ADXL345 but I didn’t see where they say to two can be connected.
Your project does sound doable. The prototype might be a bit bulky due to each component’s PCB, battery and wiring. For the finial units a custom PCB can be made that has sockets for the XBee and has the ADXL335 and processor on the PCB. That should get you a fairly compact unit.
I think you can do this with some study. Remember that google is your friend for getting info on things like ‘what is I2C or SPI?’.
Once you have parts this forum is also very helpful.