Carl Clemant at QMUL

Carl Clement very kindly came to talk at my Robotics Play Group today at QMUL. He showed us exactly how to interface stuff to the back of NAO (USB socket) and how to use pyserial to access the data. This was very helpful and we hope to be able to use these ideas to connect Arduino etc.. directly into the NAO now without using the XBees to communicate with the computer separately.

One concern, why can't we just plug the arduino into NAO and run the arduino software on Linux in NAO or run pyserial no the atom that gets input directly from the arduino!>!?!?!?!?!??!!

Answer from Chris Jack

"The thing that Carl (and I) was getting excited about is that with those chips you can interface NAO directly with I2C and TTL devices so you don't have to go through an Arduino, hence a little performance boost cos you can do the sensor ranging on the Atom and do away with the clutter of the Arduino.

As soon as you start wanting multiple sensors however I guess a microcontroller is handy to deal with everything before sending to NAO.

For this you could use a big Arduino via usb OR you could scale down by using an Arduino mini plus the chip he showed us - connecting TX on the Arduino mini to RX on the chip and RX on the Arduino to TX on the chip, as well as +5v and GND, so converting the TTL(UART) serial signal from Arduino mini to USB serial to go to the NAO.

Basically big arduinos already have the TTL(UART) to USB chip. Little Arduinos and some other devices and ATmega-based stuff doesn't."

Thanks Anna for the photo.