Team B5: Codeblox

Progress I spent this week debugging the Python firmware, and now the program works with the following scenarios: One master tile and up to five slave tiles Handling two play button presses in a row (the second press will be queued up and handed after the first iteration completes) Handling multiple iterations in a row, with or without different tile configurations between the iterations I also fixed all the known race conditions in the code by doing the following: Instead…

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Progress After settling from the craziness of the COVID-19 updates, I basically redid all of the Python simulation code that I had previously written (since we had changed our protocol/implementation so much). I finally got the firmware to be code complete, and it currently works if there is one master and one slave tile in the system. I’m still in the process of debugging cases with multiple slave tiles. I also spent some time communicating with my team members, as…

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Progress Eric and I spent the first half of this week redesigning our communication protocol, since we decided to use interrupts and sleep mode in the microcontroller. We changed the structure of our message words and the state machine of the tile. Once we had this solidified, we basically had to start the Python simulator from scratch. We added interrupt and sleep mode functionalities. We also improved the simulator from the previous one by adding the construct of a master…

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Progress This week we realized that we needed to rethink a lot of our circuit and embedded design after our design presentation. Our tiles were drawing a lot of current, which would make our product not child-safe. Since child safety is one of our top technical requirements, Eric redesigned our circuit so that each tile is powered by its own set of batteries. These tiles would start out in sleep mode, and would wake up once it detects a side…

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Progress This week I continued working on the Python firmware logic. A few changes occurred with our protocol while I was writing it that slowed down my progress. We realized that technically tiles do not need a clock line. Originally, we planned that a tile’s top and left clocks would be driven by their top and left neighbors through two clock lines. Doing so would indicate to the tile when to read from the data line of its sides. But…

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Progress Eric and I worked together on writing the Python simulation of the tiles (representing a tile’s sides, connections between its neighbors, clocks, etc). Then, after establishing the communication protocol with Eric, I began working on writing the actual firmware logic in Python to test our embedded logic. So far, I have some aspects of the state machine logic for what each tile’s side should do during a falling and rising edge of the clock, and what they should do…

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