This week Adam gave our design presentation, and we got to see how other groups have refined their project. We met on Friday to update each other on progress, discuss Rev1 budget details, and help debug the SPI protocol that Xingran was implementing.
We faced a risk in that the intended PCB manufacturer charged more than we expected and had an estimated arrival of much later than we deemed acceptable. As a result, Adam found a new manufacture that would be cheaper and offer much quicker delivery. The downside is that we will have to hand-solder some of the components with this service. However, the savings in cost (1/2 the cost) and shipping time (a week or two at most) justify this small setback. Another decision was to buy two Rev1 boards since the overall cost of fabrication would be the same with our supplier. This incurs additional component cost, but we agreed it would be better for risk mitigation to have two boards anyways.
Adam has agreed to take a larger role in the design document next week to give Sam and Xingran more time to work on software development since both are a little behind schedule. However, we are still mostly on track, especially given our ample slack time.
Next week we will work on the design document during class time, Adam will work on the mechanical enclosure, Sam will continue MATLAB prototypes and begin working on STM32 algorithm implementation, and Xingran will continue low level software bring up.