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What did you personally accomplish this week?

After deciding what each team member is responsible for researching, I was tasked to determine what libraries should be used to implement the API design. We needed decide and figure out how the GUI will transmit control signals to the MCU and how the MCU will send status signals to the GUI; this week, we needed to figure out if we were transmitting data over USB or over UART.  Finding different libraries that we could use wasn’t difficult, but finding the best libraries specifically for the STM32 that also met our needs was more challenging.  Additionally, we needed to take into account what libraries will be use with each port and the pro’s and con’s of using various different libraries.  I went over our decision for using UART and microPython + C here.

The highest priority will be writing the code for the transactions between the GUI and the MCU; once we can successfully test and run the code, we will begin designing and creating the GUI which will be implemented in Python.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I believe that my progress is slightly behind; with deciding these libraries, I feel that designing the remaining parts of the project will be easier now that we know what languages and libraries we would like to use.  Plus, I can begin finding code samples and begin writing the code for the transactions between the GUI and the MCU.  However, some potential issues that may arise are issues integrating the transactions between the MCU and other components like I2C, UART etc with the transactions between the MCU and UART (GUI), an aspect of the design that I haven’t looked too much into yet.  These issues may be more apparent once sketching the functionality of the programs and writing a few programs are completed, so hopefully, this should be resolved by next week.

What deliverables do you hope to accomplish in the next week?

This week, I hope to work closely with my team to determine the requirements of priority for each component of our project; once the upmost important requirements are determined, I hope that we can begin designing how each of our responsible portions of the project will be integrated based on each other’s portions need.  I hope to begin writing crucial functions for the implementation to verify that it is feasible to integrate transmit and receive signals from the MCU.  Additionally, I hope to further research the usage of using UART as a port on the MCU to determine if other issues may arise to ensure that using MicroPython and UART are the best choices for our project.