Welcome! Ask away

[maholli]

This is an effort to consolidate PyCubed Q&A.

Don't be shy! Ask your questions by starting a new discussion 👍

[ecburns33]

I've been working through the various demos on the Notion website, but I can't get the board to communicate to itself via the radio. We have an antenna attached and I changed the beacon.py code to reflect this. Following along with the code, I can see in the serial output where the board attempts to send a signal, but nothing is received. Interestingly, we have another board, and both are able to communicate with each other (as in they can pick up the beacons from the other board), but both are unable to transmit and receive just by themselves. Put simply, the boards can communicate with each other but cannot communicate to themselves. Does anyone know why this might be?

[maholli]

See #6

[ecburns33]

I am working to access an external magnetometer via the payload ports. The data sheet for the magnetometer states the device uses a SPI interface, so I am trying to write code to make this happen. Here is what I've written:

from pycubed import cubesat
import time
import board
import busio

spi = busio.SPI(board.SCK, MOSI=board.MOSI, MISO=board.MISO)

When I run this code, the following error occurs:
ValueError: SCK in use

To my understanding the SCK is the clock that is used between the board and the external component to standardize data transmission. I've done a little digging and it seems the radio is also using the SPI (and therefore SCK) port. Is this why the "SCK in use" error occurs? If this is the case, is there a workaround, or do I need to access via another interface (I2C, UART, etc)?

[maholli]

Hey @ecburns33 thanks for your question! See my answer in #8. In the future, just start a new discussion in the relevant category so others will be able to see it 😄.