This week, we were scheduled to work on our design presentation and PCB schematic. During the course of the week, we selected components for the PCB and purchased the most critical components for development – namely two esp32-p4 development boards. GPS drivers are in progress, but diverted due to a late pivot in our choice of SoC: we intended to use an (overpowered) Raspberry Pi due to lack of stocked SoCs in the 32MB RAM market, but found an appropriate chip for our purposes. A rough draft PCB schematic is nearly finished- all components are selected, but due to the eval board not having enough GPIO pins for our applications, a few more circuits are needed for power management on the MCU. Overall, we’re on track.
In the next week, we’re working on PCB layout, case design, GPS completion and testing, and LoRa first steps. We’re also working early on emulation and building familiarity with the PalmOS platform. This is a standard amount of risk for us: our schedule is tolerant of delays via rearranging software work or pushing work into break. We have about a week of breathing room on the PCB: our goal is to order it in the week of 10/4, but if we encounter delays, we can work on it then and still order by fall break. On the software side, we care right now about proving our ideas feasible, and detecting challenges that we’ll encounter during system integration.
This week, we’re also adding context about the circumstances of our system. A was written by Maggie, B was written by Tucker and C was written by Sophia.
Public Health, Safety, and Welfare
We aim to address the needs of children by providing a means of communication without exposing them to the unrestricted internet. It limits undesired online interactions while still allowing children to participate independently in digital activities. The goal is to preserve the child’s ability to safely communicate, take actions, and request assistance while balancing supervision and privacy.
As children are our primary users, physical and electrical safety plays a very important role in our design. The enclosure will be made of safe, nonhazardous materials, and we will be using rounded edges and securely fastened parts to reduce the risks of physical harm. Since the design also involve electrical components, we will use battery packs with built-in protection circuit module as well as embedding additional safety measures such as thermal monitoring and current protection into our design.
Social Factors
Our design is for children to use. While the social circumstances of children in the United States have been in constant flux, there’s a few key attributes that consistently distinguish it from modern adult conventions. For one, as adults, we must regularly interact with unfamiliar people and businesses that we find through referrals or online, especially without having met before or being located in the same geographic area. Often, we must be able to do so quickly and at unexpected times. Kids, on the other hand, have a majority social interaction dictated by physical proximity: communication tools are rarely the primary means of initiating relationships, but are a secondary component of being in the same school, sport, or neighborhood. This element of physical and temporal proximity is also practical for safety: parents generally don’t want to allow unsolicited or unmonitored internet interactions with their children.
Therefore, our design is underpinned by these social connections, particularly in our multi-device philosophy. We chose PalmOS because it’s a platform with a persistent concept of local connection – IrDA, an infrared p2p connection system, persisted throughout the lineup, but it had issues with the short connection distance and need for consistent line-of-sight. Therefore, we believe the idea was not explored to its maximum. With LoRa, we have a greater (but still local) connection distance, and can foster multi-device use cases. We can also exploit urban mesh networks. Further, we believe that the choice of technology shapes how users interact with the world, and we believe that local networking fosters developing in-person connections through interactions that the Internet was never built for.
Economic Factors
In terms of economic factors, the most important goal is for our product to be affordable to families as a viable alternative to current smartphones (or other current phones specifically manufactured to be “dumb”) short of buying legacy models that are unsupported and out of production. In order to do this, we would like to use the most affordable hardware possible that will still meet our needs, and assemble it on a custom board to save costs (and space) in the long run. In order to keep the housing durable but affordable, we’d also like to manufacture the case out of plastic via 3D printing.
In addition, users are free to install their own custom software (whether free from the internet, or self-made) as a built-in feature of the device, instead of being locked into a specific suite of apps, giving users a lot of flexibility without incurring additional costs.