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Operation is possible at 300, 600, 1,200, 2,400, 4,800, 9,600, 14,400, 19,200, 28,800, 38,400, 57,600 or 115,200bit/s.
“The actual fibre optic emitter and receiver pair can operate up to 5M baud – the shield is simply a way of demonstrating the potential of incorporating an optical fibre link into a design,” said OMC.
The shield uses the company’s H19E2000BHR 660nm (visible red) fibre optic transmitter and H19R5000D digital receiver (which are its FFT2000BHR emitter installed into an H19 receptacle, and its FDR5000D digital receiver treated the same way).
On-board jumpers allow the transmitter and receiver to be connected to a choice of Arduino I/O pins – default is Tx is connected to UART Serial pin 1 and Rx to UART Serial pin 0.
The associated demonstration code continually streams increasing integer values through the Arduino UART to the transmitter, and receives them back via the fibre link.
“To show this running, we put a 16×2 LCD shield on top to display the numbers being streamed,” company commercial director William Heath told Electronics Weekly. “The demo code can also be used with two shields on separate microprocessors to demonstrate data transmission over fibre between two MCUs.”
Find the Arduino fibre optic communication shield product page here – the transmitter and receiver data sheets are linked from the right hand column
