13/9/2021: This idea was born in an effort to make a networking programming module more structured and realistic. Originally we used Arduino Unos with a Seeedstudio Canbus shield. We hooked them together and the students read a sensor and sent readings. They also displayed some of their peers readings but not others. This was very easy and produced similar and uninspiring results. So, time for something different.

This has taken me about 18 months to get here but it all started with an idea of getting the students to control the progress of a game. Initially this started life on an Uno as well but I very quickly ran into speed problems so I moved to a Teensy 3.5 at 120MHz. The game I chose was the Tower of Hanoi. Initially this was coded as an iterative process but is now recursive.

This was great and spawned the addition of a 2.8″ capacitive touchscreen from Adafruit. The added graphics were brilliant showing the disks making up the Tower of Hanoi game and giving the students vital visual feedback.

Other problems included the students not knowing why a message was failing. They didn’t have the knowledge or confidence (some might say motivation) to build a basic receiver using the sample programs so in came a repurposing of the hardware. I built a ‘sniffer’ that recorded all traffic on the network and let you scroll through it. There was also an option to save it to SD for PC analysis. This worked okay but having two different pieces of hardware was challenging so I decided to merge the two…..

The current version was born. It uses a Teensy 3.6 at 180MHz, two Adafruit 2.8″ capacitive touchscreens and a custom PCB.