I am working on a project with suits (jackets) having a lot of sensors and LED’s and what not. Once I have made some more progress will share the results in a different topic, but at present I would like some advice about a particular aspect of it.
I would like to have the suits communicating via electrodes sewed to the wrists. The idea is that when two people clamp their electrodes together (left hand - right hand) something awesome happens. For example, they “charge up” each other and the LED’s light up more and more. When multiple people connect even more crazy stuff can happen. Standing waves, light creatures jumping from one suit to another.
Now the technical challenge… I need some way to send messages to each other. A little bit more than on or off, because I want different programs to be possible and a variable amount of connected suits. Sending a few bytes in in 1 ms or so would be enough. Since I want to make the connection as easy as possible, I would like a single wire protocol. I realize that I will need to make a common ground connection too.
Sending some bits around is not that difficult, but the problem is the potential occupation of the data line. Secondly, there can’t be a single master with multple slaves configuration because you don’t know which suits are going to be connected. Everybody is a master basically.
So I need the following:
- a single wire (+ common ground) communication protocol
- that allows for master to master communication with variable number of masters
- that can decide if the data line is free and/or some kind of error handling when two masters are sending at the same time or when half messages are received
I have already quite some ideas but I realize I might be reinventing the wheel here. So my question is basically: does something like this exists? Any general comments or advice is welcome too.
What does this have to do with particle photons? nothing in particular, I just like them and use them for this project.
Thanks,