Author: xjin2

The past 2 weeks, including the Spring Break, had mainly two focuses. First one is to reorganize our team and get the design report written and submitted, and the second one is to order the parts and start building.

The design report was a big challenge for us. We stupidly ignored everyone’s advice on starting early, and left ourselves with barely enough time to finish the report. We did try our best to gather every piece of information we could on the parts chosen, and documented every step in coming up with our design. For the hardware part, I realize that we are missing information on the design trade-off studies. We are aware of that and we will not miss this critical part in our final report. The truth is, we messed up because we were all too busy with the sudden workload increase from multiple midterms, and we were focusing perhaps a little bit too much on actually building the device, rather than writing the report.

All the major components (components that cannot be sourced at a generic parts store or be found in my personal parts bin) have been sourced and have arrived during the spring break. Assembly has begun and hardware assembly is expected to be done by the end of this weekend, latest by the end of next week (Friday). I do expect little hiccups but so far so good. Currently RPi is setup with an OS running, and the UPS power source for the RPi is up and running (charging function still needs to be tested and API integration still needs to be done).

This week I have been mainly focused on getting our  design choices right, and presenting for our design review.

During the searching for components for our design, I was amazed at the vast selection the Internet has to offer. Following advice from Professor Mukherjee, and after taking a closer look at some of the products, I realized that for a formal project, I cannot just go on Amazon and buy from the cheapest vendor. We need data sheets for the components. That’s what prompted me to eventually find all the electronic components on Adafruit. They have data sheets, and also some tutorials listed under every product we’ve chosen.

Preparing for the presentation was something I should have spent more time on. We kind of rushed through making the slides, leading to a couple of typos which I am not very proud of. The first time I actually went through all the slides and practiced was an hour before the presentation. Gladly, I think it went OK.

It is a fact, however, that we are still not that familiar with some of the quirks of the components we have chosen, but we are making progress. I think from this point on, us three as a team should most importantly be more proactive about deadlines. Sometimes I am busy because I am taking too many classes this semester, and I am glad my team mates could help out. However, in the end we are trying to avoid this sort of rushing before the deadline situation.

This week has been mostly focused on researching components we can use in our design. During the conversation with Professor Mukherjee and our TA Alex, it became very clear that we need to lay out every single detail we can think of in our design, and it will make our work much easier down the line.

I made some design choices:

1. Buttons will be wired into a matrix, with diodes to achieve “N-key rollover”.
2. Screen will be HDMI to avoid the use of GPIO pins. The smallest size HDMI screen for Pi from a good vendor is 5 inches. https://www.adafruit.com/product/2232
3. Buttons will be an assortment of these in different colors. https://www.adafruit.com/product/1504
4. Adafruit’s TDK InvenSense ICM-20948 9-DoF IMU is an ideal candidate for us. https://www.adafruit.com/product/4554
5. https://www.adafruit.com/product/4133 This potentiometer is a good candidate for our analog inputs