fischertechnik community forum

Hello all the Fischertechnic enthusiasts,

we bought fischertechnik kits and TXT Controller for the school. With this unit (programmed in RoboPro) our C# application communicates via arduino (UART), arduino - TXT is via I2C bus (arduino is as translator to UART). What we have studied, in this case TXT Controller cannot work as a slave and doesnt support I2C multimastering in RoboPro driving program (information from Rei Vilo's fischertechnik Corner).

My question is, hasn't anyone tried or has anyone verified that it is possible to have multiple TXT Controllers connected to the I2C bus in this way to send data to a common Arduino? Either via a regular I2C hub, or an I2C multiplexer hub (the latter has I2C addressed connectors).

We have this connection via Arduino and I2C because we need to have a model handler in ROBOPro for students.

As a worst-case solution, it would be to have an Arduino connection to each TXT controller, but then that's a lot of UART threads in a C# application, so we'd like to avoid that. I'm doing some research to see what to buy and in what quantities.

Would be great if this will work for sending info to Arduino, but if it could work other way, that would be useful too.

Thanks for any relevant information.

Hi,
There are another options when use the TXT's as clients over IP:
-) the use of Berkeley socket libraries
-) the use of websockets (Embedded CivetWeb libraries)
-) the use of MQTT (Mosquitto libraries).
This can even been integrated into RoboPro with the use of the RoboPro extension SLI.

The TXT firmware implements only single master I2C (400 khz, 100 khz does not work properly; including clock stretching)