The wiring board is having a fixed program on board called bootloader. This one is responsible of loading the new programs in the board when exporting them from the IDE in the computer

The bootloader checks out whether or not there is a new program coming through the serial port directly after resetting the board. If it is the case, it waits for some time before launching the program

The bootloader can be configured to use either 32-33 or 0-1 as the pins to luach applications

(in the picture, the schematic for the board)

 

 

This is one interesting feature that could have come out as a side effect of designing this add-on for wiring. Since the circuit acts as a cable replacement for the USB connection, it should be possible to reprogram the board wirelessly. This would obviously require having wiring connected to a power supply since usually we take power from the USB port.

Unfortunately there is an impedance problem between the USB-Serial converter on the wiring board and the Bluetooth chip that doesn't allow us to program the i/o board. This makes it impossible to enable this function without a further modification of how wiring works nowadays

Anyway we are confident that there should be a round-about to the problem. It may be possible to retouch Wiring's bootloader for using the second on-board serial port to load the programs instead of the wired one. That would allow us to use the bluetooth board as main mean of communication

Wireless reconfiguracion of devices is one of the big challenges within the technology of Wireless Sensor Networks, yet unexplored by interaction designer, but still very promising