This week, I worked on two tasks in particular. The first task was to divide up what needed to be done for the report and make some progress on it. We divided up the necessary sections amongst us, and I am taking the parts with Architecture and System Implementation. I have already started working on some of its content in order for it to be ready by Wednesday’s deadline.
The second task that I accomplished was testing the long force sensitive resistor. First, I will present my data and circuit. Then, I will talk more about how this information will be used to further our project.
While trying to test the sensor at my home, I realized that I didn’t have a way to measure weights of objects. Therefore, ‘force applied’ and ‘sensitivity’ columns are blank for now. I will measure the objects I used later in lab.
- FSR is finnicky at smaller amounts of force. However, we don’t need to worry about that for our application which will have comparatively larger forces.
- Small movements change the values by <100. This is most likely due to weak connections on the breadboard. These errors can be eliminated when we solder the sensor.
- The sensor needs to be as flat as possible for reliable results.
- As shown in the data, smaller resistor results in lower measured values. This will be ideal for the big forces like a person’s weight.
- It is not foldable in the circle shape. Z shape might be possible but can end up damaging the component.
- I will discuss this more with my team, and we will probably end up using more and smaller sensors per square. This will also mean that we use the digital pins of the Arduino and set threshold using the appropriate resistors rather than on the software.
I will gather more testing data with people stepping on it in the future. This will probably be done after the switch to the other smaller sensors. For next week, I will figure out how Arduino should send data to python. So far, I am on track with my schedule.