This week, we received some of our parts and began testing our board and the sensors. We focused on thresholding our force sensitive resistors to determine good potential values for what would count as a button press. We also looked into BLE implementations for the specific board we selected. The most significant risks for our project now are that two of the pins on our board are shorted. We’re planning to order another board this week and experiment with the current one, but we’re hoping that this integrity issue only applies to the board we received. Besides that, our sensors seem to be working fine (except for one that was a little faulty, but we ordered one more than we needed so we should be alright). In addition to this, we also refined our slides for the design presentation, and we began working on the design review report.
When developing our solution we used the following engineering principles: economy of mechanism, top-down design, and design for contingency. For economy of mechanism, we wanted our design to be as simple as possible while still achieving our design requirements so that there would be as little room for error as possible. We also wanted our design to be simple and intuitive to use. When designing, we chose a top-down approach, focusing on the bigger parts of the design and our end goals and then backtracking all the way down to the low level code and hardware wiring that would help us achieve our ultimate goal. Finally, we designed a lot for contingencies, in case any of our tests failed. We came up with proactive risk mitigation strategies and backup plans so we’d be prepared.