This week was probably the most productive week that we as a team have had, mainly because we got out final product probably 95% working. As for me, this week I started by preparing for our final presentation which was mine to give. Then, I did a lot of soldering, because as of last week, we had one strainer fully soldered, but we needed to solder the other two. This involved soldering wires to extend the length of the LEDs, soldering connections onto the ends, and soldering the push buttons. We also did a lot of testing the connections between the Nano and Arduino in a less controlled environment and with all the strainers in place. In order to help with human friendliness and ease of connections, to make the strainers easily detachable, we glued the plastic wire ends together, and put them through the holes of the control tower (see below for picture, it makes more sense when you see it). How this increases user friendliness is all users need to do is plug in the ends of the wires to their corresponding counterparts. Each strainer’s position is drawn on our positioning map, and they all have a number, so users just need to plug the corresponding wire connections for each strainer. The connections are also all different types, so user’s shouldn’t get confused. Lastly, this week, we tested out the entire system with all three strainers working at once, dropping in food, and it worked as intended. The strainers all changed state appropriately, the strainers moved up and down in about 7 seconds, and the strainers cooked for the right amount of time. Overall, this week we kind of put everything together in a less controlled environment, tested it all, and made it some what user friendly.
I think I am right on track. Since this is the last week (there is still a few more days but not enough to make any huge changes), we would either be done or completely behind, and we are pretty much done. All the strainers work, we identify the proper ingredients, and everything is kind of working as we envisioned it.
This next week will just be finalizing up all of our deliverables, so finishing up our video (we have basically everything we need, we just need to put it together), finish up the poster (which is about half done), and the final report (which is just adding stuff on from the design report).