Getting Started with the Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi
When we last spoke about the Arduino Giga R1 Wi Fi, I had gotten the newsletter announcing that it was available. I went ahead and made a short video looking at some of the new features for the Giga R1 Wi Fi. If you go to the store, at least in the Americas, its sold out right now so youre going to want to sign up to be notified when its available, but were going to go ahead. And now that I have it in hand here were going to open the box were going to go ahead and prepare the Arduino IDE and then were going to run. A few example sketches trying out some of the new hardware on the board lets go. Do the unbox okay lets get the Giga R1 Wi Fi out of the box. Oh thats, interesting its mounted onto this plastic sled it snaps on and off, but I wasnt expecting that plastic, sled thats, pretty cool addition. There boy look at all those pins got your analogs, your digitals, the USBC Port is for powering and programming your Giga R1 Wi Fi, and you can also connect it to a PC and simulate a keyboard and a mouse connected to your PC. Usba supports mass storage. Like the USB thumb drive, you can also plug a keyboard or a mouse in here. If you like, the audio port supports audio in and out in case, you have like a speech recognition program. Now the microcontroller has two cores.
You can run two Arduino sketches separately at the same time, even micro, python and on the board. Here you see, we also have the display and Camera risers. Oh yeah, it looks like I forgot something there. There is this add on Wi Fi antenna. You just remove that protective cover and pop it onto that connector. Next to the USB port. There I dont know what that black plastic clip is but well find out. Okay, so weve finished installing the board definition for the Arduino embed OS gigaborts. You can see its installed there. You can see here under Tools, board manager, theres a whole separate category, Arduino embed OS gigaborts and Ive selected, the Arduino Giga R1. So now lets take a look at some of the example sketches Im going to go over here. Examples yeah right here: examples for Arduino, Giga R1 got camera examples: nice, Colonel debug. I dont know what that is: MCU confirm sketch PDM serial plotter portenta lvgl, so this is display a keyboard and mouse. It looks like interesting portenta sdram operations portent to video interesting stuff. Rpc yeah, so the MCU on this board has two cores that can uh. Basically, you can run two programs at the same time. I believe this RPC section here is to allow you to communicate between the two cores were going to explore that more scheduler more stuff about that MCU. Ah threat debug, yeah, Im interested in the USB Mass Storage.
I want to use a flash disk on that. A port and theres usb hid keyboard and mouse and Wi Fi. Those are the ones I want to try out. First and theres, also more tutorials on the docs page, theres a whole bunch of tutorials. I dont know how these line up with the example sketches. We saw there yeah theres a lot to go through here and were gon na, make several videos Im pretty sure on the topic of the Arduino Giga R1 Wi Fi. Okay, so we got to unbox the Arduino Giga Wi Fi, and we got to prepare the Arduino IDE with the boards manager. Definitions for the Giga R1 Wi Fi now were ready to check out some example sketches uh Wi Fi is obviously going to be the one that Im most interested in, and we see this examples heres all of the examples down at the bottom. This is Wi Fi web client. A lot of their example sketches now include this Arduino Secrets. H include file where you would type in your SSID and password, so it doesnt have to be visible in the sketch, and you see here is the include statement for that. This particular example sketch I its the one they include in examples, but I think its going to be kind of boring because you just go to a website and then basically read whatever characters get returned when you do a get and of course this is over HTTP.
Not https, so I wanted to check out some of the other tutorials. If you go to the docs page here under tutorials, this takes you down here. They show you what weve already done, installing the board manager definition and identifying the example sketches, Etc. But down here is more Wi Fi network examples, and this one looks particularly interesting yeah. I hear theyre again talking about that Arduino Secrets h. They have WPA connection basically connecting to your Wi Fi network RTC sample similar, but apparently its printing out the time or something scanning networks. Yeah thatd be great, except to show you all the networks that you pick up if youre at my house, this one looks interesting. Wi Fi chat, server, simple server that distributes any incoming messages to all connected clients. You use telnet to your devices IP address and type. Then you can see the clients output in the serial monitor as well. So lets see what happens here. Yeah, if you dont, have telnet or if you dont know what telnet is you can search for it, its basically a console, driven, yeah turn Windows, features on or off and telnets an individual feature that you can activate. This is in Windows, 10. Ill have to check it out in Windows, 11. Im, not quite sure. You have well see the same thing in Windows, 11., yeah telnuts down here, and you just check the box and it installs telnet, and then you basically activate telnet by using a command prompt, and you just tell them that and the IP address you might have to Specify a port if you were going to connect to a particular Port, Etc.
So lets see what happens when we look at this sketch yeah Ive already they have a copy button here for these examples and Ive already copied it and Ive included my Arduino Secrets H file here, yeah its going to connect to Wi Fi were going to see It do that and then its going to wait for client connections and its going to respond to client connections. So if they get a client connection and you type something in telnet after connecting then its going to reply to, you seems kind of interesting. So lets go ahead and get started with this one. So Im going to go ahead and upload this there we go were hitting upload, of course, Ive already selected, the Giga R1 and the associated com Port. That goes along with it. So while this is compiling Im going to go ahead and crop this out, okay, so that chat server, sketch has finished loading Im going to go ahead and reset this again there we go thats the sound of it resetting there. Now. A lot of these sketches have a clause in here where it will pause waiting for serial to start yeah. Itll start serial and thatll wait for the connection of the serial monitor right wall. Not serial so well go ahead and start the serial monitor there. We go its trying to connect to Wi Fi yeah. You can tell this was configured to do telnet because telnets on server Port 23.
Okay, we are connected, so lets see how this works Im going to go ahead and launch the command prompt and were just going to move this over here now, keep an eye on the steel monitor down below and lets tell them that tell net 1.2.168.1.50 Music there. We go hello, client and you can see down here. We have a new client. Basically, if you want to do this again, its theres something in the code here that says, if its not already connected, if its not already connected, do this so youll see here Ill. Try it again and its not going to do anything there, it just flashes by and comes back to the prompt. So if I close serial monitor Im going to reset this there we go were going to open serial. Monitor now were reconnected to Wi. Fi got the same IP address and we can run that telnet command again and we get hello, a client, so thats an interesting sketch that could bear a little more work. You could tone that in and read some value from one of the analog or digital pins. You could send text via telnet and it could receive it and theres a lot of development. You could do with this its pretty interesting sketch, so I encountered several issues with the USB functionality on the Giga R1 Wi Fi. I set out to try this USB host keyboard sketch here and you can see right off the top.
It says, use this USB host giga repository here and you can download it as a zip as they advise. If you copy this sketch here and load it. You run into this error missing. This hid host include file, and so I searched that – and I come to this article here and you can see several people have basically stuck with the same problem and uh. Then it comes to find out. Oh well just use this example sketch from this repository and so Ive used the example sketch USB gigahost keyboard and weve got it loaded up on our Arduino here Im going to stop my serial monitor, lets re set there we go were reset now Im going to Load my serial monitor. We should see something come up here. Well, give it a sec, make sure were selected, the right device and Port sure and sad to say, youre, not seeing anything come up in serial monitor like its supposed to Im a little disappointed in that. So both the tutorial sketch on the Arduino website is flawed and I dont know what to make of this USB host Giga not working. It should just be a simple matter of running that sketch after I installed the library and its not working as you can see the other USB example there they go on to talk about that as well. Oh yeah, same experience, USB flash drive. Examples do not compile. After installing the following, so you have to install this Arduino USB host embed 5.
Lets make sure we have that installed in our library manager. Just to be sure Library manager, yeah, you can see. I have that installed. Yeah theres several things that theyre talking about in this article. You have to use the name of the device, yeah see they came back and they tried to answer the questions. Yeah so theyre saying the USB drive should be FAT32 MBR partition scheme, and then they also go on to inform you that in the code its the name of the USB stick name of the USB stick. Well, I have that. Stick in my computer right now and Ive named it USB, you can see right there. The disk label lets go ahead and look at properties, so I went and formatted it FAT32 and I made it. Usb is the name of the device and then in the sketch lets take a closer look yeah when you initialize it, you use the name of the USB stick and then theres split C. Usb file read sketch so lets see yeah. So when you do an F open, its F open, slash name of the disk and then name of the file, and so I had this Arduino text file ready to go. But when we send this sketch over, it just causes it to crash. And you can tell its crashing because youve got the alternating four fast red lights for slow red lights. You have to press reset twice and then send another sketch that isnt going to cause it to crash so thats how you recover.
If you see the flashing red lights on your Arduino, Giga, R1 Wi Fi, so anyway, you know its its a bit of a disappointment Im going to go ahead and work through some more example sketches and Ill be reporting on those things that I find working and Ill definitely be revisiting these until Im successful at making these work, we did get Wi, Fi working so theres a lot of interesting things to explore there with the Giga R1 Wi Fi. I want to check out, you know see if we can see any difference in performance between the Giga, R1 Wi, Fi and other Arduino products, but anyway, thanks for checking in on the Arduino Giga R1 Wi Fi with me, okay. Well, I hope you enjoyed checking out some of the example sketches on the new Arduino Giga R1 Wi Fi leave a comment Down Below on what example sketches youd like me to try. Next give this video a like, and before you go watch more of my Arduino videos.
