This week, we completed our design report and made progress on both software and hardware. In terms of software, we made progress on the emulator, as well as converting bare-mental implementation to using RTOS tasks and an embedded UI. For hardware, we completed the layout and ordered the PCB over fall break.
Our main risk is that the PCB ordering was delayed; however, the order was approved and will ship within the next few days, when we can assemble the PCB in TechSpark; we also planned for fall break and the week after as a buffer in case this happened. We also wrote about global, cultural, and environmental factors below. A was written by Maggie, B was written by Sophia, and C was written by Tucker.
Global Factors
The global factors we considered are tied to some of the main motivations of this product, which is to address the universal concern of technology addiction, internet safety, and healthy digital boundary for especially the younger population. Nowadays, children need to communicate independently and participate in digital activities without unrestricted access to the public internet. We design the product to address this need through a constrained application environment, messaging, and location tracking system to support the children’s independence while helping parents and supervisors monitor their safety and digital boundaries. Besides this, we also want to provide an alternative communication method using LoRa for situations where cellular service is unavailable, unreliable, or unaffordable. For now on the prototype, we use the 915MHz band, and we would adjust this frequency on future versions if we plan to use it in regions outside of the US.
Cultural Factors
Parents must often send their children to school or other spaces, such as after-school activities or playdates, independently. Our product provides a solution for parents to feel more comfortable with their child’s independence through being able to communicate with them while still maintaining safety both virtually and in the real world. The amount of hours that the child spends away from their parent may differ depending on age, family values (e.g. allowing children to play outside until late vs. keeping them at home without explicit permission), extracurricular activities (sports, cram school, or lack thereof), and more; however, we would like the battery life of the product to last 16 hours idle to allow for recharging during 8 hours of sleep.
Environmental Factors
In terms of environmental factors, we primarily considered material use, energy consumption, repairability, and e-waste. For our prototype, we use components such as LCD screen and LiPo battery, which rely on raw materials such as liquid crystals and lithium. Since they are off-the-shelf, we designed the device to reduce unnecessary resource consumption by using a rechargeable battery, and utilized a minimal number of low-power components required for the spec to reduce current draw. We also attempted to make as many aspects of our design modular as possible in order to reduce the need of replacing the entire device when one sub-component requires repair, thus improving the product’s lifespan and reducing e-waste.