Connecting the Thingy:53 to an Arduino Setup

[donutsorelse]

This forum feels pretty advanced, so if this is the wrong place to ask this question apologies and please let me know where I should be asking it instead.

My goal is to connect the Thingy:53 to an Arduino Uno such that when something is detecting with Edge Impulse (eg. a voice command), it will cause the Arduino to perform a function.  I've been looking for resources on how to do this in terms of both physical connections and what the code should look like.  Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

Physically the Thingy:53 has a addon connector where some GPIOs, a debug header, etc. is routed out. So you can connect some pins there to your Arduino. Then you could use those for a sensible interface, for instance UART. Then adapt your nRF firmware to output status or similar. In practice, this probably means taking and Edge Impulse sample and modifying it slightly, adding the UART and outputting something sensible for your application when appropriate.

[donutsorelse]

Perfect, sounds good with the physical add-on. From the Thing:53 product brief it looks like the external connector is a "Qwiik/Stemma/Groove compatible 4-pin JST", so would something like this work? 

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3950?gclid=Cj0KCQiAvqGcBhCJARIsAFQ5ke6wYqtCcGxQlYEhUtR0GwaXqEpk9RPD9fN5wrmrgAPMz-Iu0Ki2EwoaAjFyEALw_wcB

Regarding the code I had looked into samples but in looking again I found the data forwarder (below), which looks perfect.  That answers a lot of questions on the android side but I'm not seeing the code for the Edge Impulse side of things.  It references the accelerometer-demo-1 project but I don't see the code for it and assume I would need to create my own project since I'm not using the accelerometer.  Would you be able to point me to that code please?  I'm also curious if in the edge impulse code I'd be able to forward to serial based on the ML results (eg. it recognizes the voice command so I tell Arduino to do its thing).

docs.edgeimpulse.com/.../cli-data-forwarder

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

I was thinking about the debug addon board that ships with the Thingy:53. You can see details of it in the HW files. The connector is a Pin Header 2x10, 1.27mm (normally used for SWD).  You can just solder things directly onto the board in the gold plated holes also, if that is simpler, that is up to you.

The corresponding project for the nRF side for the data forwarder is found under <nRF Connect SDK>/nrf/samples/edge_impulse/data_forwarder/.