Status Report 5/1

This week was busy because we had confirmation that we would not be able to get the PCB in time to make everything work together. Therefore, we started transitioning to a fully Arduino style project. Unfortunately this means that a lot of the physical planning and software we wrote for the PCB is going to have to be scrapped and written anew for the Arduino. I was able to connect a separate nRF24 transceiver to the Arduino and broadcast a signal that we are going to use to communicate the weight that the load cell is reading. I have attached a picture of the device down below. Unfortunately nRF24s do not have capability to connect to BTLE devices, so the only information that can be communicated is one 32bit “advertisement packet”. Luckily since we are only transmitting one value this should not be a problem. I also improved on the mounting of the scale and was able to make it accurate! I have attached a video incorporating the entire subsystem as we have it right now. Unfortunately, the LCD display broke right as I was fiddling with the SPI bus and wouldn’t display anything even after a hard reset. I have attached a photo of the broken display below. It will be challenging to make everything work compactly by the demo, but hopefully we will find some luck along the way.