What the, is a flying hat?

Well is a hat that can be detached from the Pi and still works. Of course, it needs power.

In the picture, the 6 channel ADC is the board on the left with all the wires sticking out. On the right, the little Raspberry Pi zero W is talking to the ADC over a UDP channel. The USB cables are just for power. Since the Zero is headless, it has plenty of processing power to run the Node-Red flow used to communicate with the ESP32 based ADC.

The awesome prototype flow is shown above. It starts by detecting the network Ip, the user then input the type of hat and gives it a name. The flow then broadcasts the search message over the network previously detected. When the ESP32 ADC hat responds, it saves the IP and further communications become send – receive UDP messages.

The picture above shows the “Add Devices” tab. The ADC has already been found at address 172.16.1.72. I hope you won’t get hacked by showing my network IP.

As you can see, I gave my ESP32 Hat a very original name, “My Device”. On this home tab, we have the values of ch0 and 1 displayed in real time.

The ADC Raspberry flying Hat is also awesome. Using Arduino, I programmed it to make the network configuration as simple as possible. At power up, it reads the network configuration from non-volatile memory and tries to connect to the Wi-Fi Access-point. If it is unable to connect, it becomes an access-point and the user can input the Wi-Fi SSID and password in the web screen. It then reverts to client mode and connects to the Wi-Fi.

There is still much work to be done, stay tuned!