Multiple ANT sensors

[Michel]

Hello, I can't find an answer on my question, but maybe I looked over it.

I'm desiging a sensor which will communicate to a smartphone by BLE and to a PC by ANT. The communication with BLE is working fine. But with the communication via ANT I have some small issues I can't solve. Maybe someone over here can help me.

The sensor will communicate with a PC with a channel periode of 3277 (10Hz) in broadcastmode (send data only). The data size is 8 bytes. All of these things are working for me. The PC can be, if necessary, equipped with multiple USB dongles.

Only I don't know how I can get multiple sensors working besides each other. They only have to communicate to a PC and not to each other. When all the devices are configured the same, ANTWare shows me collisions. In total I would need to support about 100 sensors in one room working beside each other.

At this moment I was trying to let them all communicate on the same channel, but each sensor will get a different frequency. This frequency would be set in a UICR register. Is this the only way or is there a easier way to get it working?

I'm looking forward to a reply.

[Asbjørn]

Spacing them out across multiple frequencies and channels is the only way to do this. That way you would ensure that the different devices interfere as little as possible with each other. I would start with a few devices and expand gradually. That way you will be able to see when you setup starts running into issues on one frequency and can add an extra one.

[Michel]

Thank you for your reply. I will try this.

[Michel]

I tried the multiple frequencies and channels. But is it true that ANTware II (v4.1) doesn't support multiple channels at 1 time? I only can open 1 channel at a time.

[Asbjørn]

I just did a quick test here and it seems like I'm able to open multiple channels on different frequencies at the same time. I have ANTware 4.1 installed. It could depend on the dongle you are using though. The new dongles that are based on the nRF24AP2-USB will handle at least 4 channels and potentially up to 8 channels.

[Michel]

I just found out I had to give all the devices a unique device number. I don't know if this is the way, but it did help me. I can now add up to 8 channels. With 2 dongles I can communicate with 16 sensors, so for now it's working. Maybe in the future I will use the ANT shared channel example to setup a network.

[Asbjørn]

Glad it worked out and thanks for the feedback.