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I2C Demonstration

for Mechanical Engineering Freshmen Lab

June 2023 - Jan 2024

Final Product

image The left shows an image of my finished interactive exhibit to both show how I2C communication between Arduinos works and enable other mechanical engineering students to utilize serial communication within their projects. To get a feel for the communication, students can power up the system to play with the buttons associated with each Arduino board. To then dig deeper into the theory of the communication protocol, students can scan the QR code at the top right of the panel and download commented code describing all interactions in detail. 

Digital Planning

image For each incoming freshmen class of MechEs, Dr. Marra teaches a two semester lab course sequence. Each semester the freshmen class also has design projects to execute. Dr. Marra noticed that many students were hoping to take advantage of serial communication protocols available through Arduino but there had yet to be a demonstration available to the students for this. My job was to add an I2C demonstration to the panel shown on the left.
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I decided it would be beneficial to first start on TinkerCAD to lay out my ideas. After workshopping ideas back and forth with Dr. Marra, we eventually settled on the layout shown here on the left. TinkerCAD File

Physical Demonstration

image The arduino code was commented out with two different pathways for communication. This would enable students to follow the code head as it moves. With each button press, an 8-segment display would show which device (either a Controller or Follower) is trying to communicate with which other device. The communication system that we had set up made it so that all aspects of the I2C documentation written up on Arduino's website were used in the code. This would enable students to have examples for each potential use case they might envision they needed.
image The left shows the I2C demonstration as it currently rests inside the freshmen lab at JHU. Here is a link to the writeup and code as hosted on Dr. Marra's website .