See this Twitter thread for background info. This is the second half of the project, the PyGamer side of things. The BastWan code is here.
Since the PyGamer has Feather headers at the back, I thought it would be a cool idea to stick a BastWan there and use the whole setup as a LoRa distance test kit. However there are a few issues, notable plugging in a BastWanas is freezes the PyGamer – I suspect one of the Vcc pins conflicts with it; it is nigh impossible to cross Tx1 and Rx1 on either side. So I decide to switch to I2C for communication between the devices – which works fine. The back layer makes connecting the BastWan a little difficult, and it wobbles a lot, especially on 3 or 4 pins only – for now I have only 3 pins connecter, SDA, SCL, GND, leaving 3V connected by a Dupont cable so that I can remove it and connect the USB cable instead when I want to look at the Serial Monitor. I added female headers to give more space to the BastWan – and its SMA antenna connector – and things are now more stable. Adding pins on both sides – those that won't cause a freeze, like the Ax and Dx pins – helps too.
3 pins and a cable
Adding female headers helps stabilizing the BastWan
To make things simple and fast, I am using for now the termio library by BeBoXos, which works great. I get to have a small UI with zero effort thanks to this library. It is sure not sexy, but this is (Circuit)Python. If I wanted sexy I'd use something else, and a bigger screen.
Simple, fast and efficient!
It doesn't mean we can't do a little fancy! Since the PyGamer has 5 neopixels, we might has well make use of them. Here's what it looks like when a message is received:
Isn't that cute?
The plan is to add quite a few more features, but for now it'll do!
The neopixels effect is cute and easily implemented: see slideNeo(). The getElapsedTime(tm) function can come in handy. And finally the I2C communication protocol is simple and seems to work well. It is also (mostly) error proof. There are as many try-except blocks as can be needed.