With the PCBs finally coming in, I spent the beginning of the week with my team soldering the components onto the boards in TechSpark. This involved placing the stencil onto each board, spreading solder paste onto each stencil/board, manually placing each component, and placing the boards in the oven. Later, Darwin and I tested the communication from the Arduino, through my subsystem, to the VM that he is testing on, which worked successfully. Then, we began designing a series of tests that will allow us to test the detection algorithms and touch functionality. The idea of theses tests is that rather than getting physical data (since this is still not ready), we will randomly generate realistic data that can be detected, categorized, and sent to the touch functionality. I feel that I am on track, and although the delay on the decoders shipping has shifted the schedule back a bit, our slack time should allow me to still finish on time. Next week, I plan to finish these tests and debug the software with Darwin, and to work on the soldering once the decoders come in.
Matthew Shen’s Status Report for 4/3/22
This week was dedicated to PCB construction. Unfortunately, our progress was slowed since I ordered the wrong decoders for our PCB. However, with regards to what was successful, our PCB header pins line up perfectly, so when we solder them in, the frame should be perfectly rectangular. Additionally, when a test was run with the wrong decoders (active low instead of active high), the logic seemed correct in that all of the LEDs that were expected to be on were off and vice-versa. This suggests that once we receive the correct decoders, the particular frame we tested should work as expected. Another thing that went well was the soldering process in general. All of our components fit perfectly on their pads, and the stencil-oven combination has worked flawlessly. This coming week, we hope to get the new decoders on Monday so that we can get at least one pair of edges working for our demo on Wednesday. If that pair of edges functions appropriately, we may try to have the whole frame up and running by Wednesday. My task for this week will mainly be soldering and hardware debugging. We are still on schedule to finish in time.