This week, I gave our proposal presentation after all of us put together the slides where we made it a goal to focus on exactly where our use case requirements were coming from and how to best address them. While presentations lasted two days and we didn’t have that class time, Jason and I met after class to plan out how we should progress based on our schedule. We quickly met with Kaashvi to determine when we can order our parts as we planned to do so sometime this weekend or Monday.
In regards to my own research, I started with the sensor research as they are hardware components that make up our node structure and we need to order these parts as soon as possible so we can start reading from them and testing the nodes individually. As for smoke sensors, I was doing research based on Arduino fire detection methods and came to the conclusion that the MQ-02 smoke sensor might be a good bet as it is low cost, sensitive to flammable gas and smoke, and available for different applications. Furthermore, I was debating between DHT-22 temperature sensor (low cost digital temperature and humidity sensor that measures surrounding air but it requires careful timing to grab data) and the DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor which have good accuracy and works within the temperature range we want while being easily available to connect to an Arduino digital input. I definitely want to get some more feedback before placing the orders and finalizing the sensors. I was also looking into flame detection sensors which could be useful too. Ideally we can go over these choices with Kaashvi and Tamal early next week before putting in the order.
In the coming week, we would want to ensure that we order the necessary sensors and hardware that make up our nodes. Furthermore, while we wait for them to come in we can do more research on Eagle so that once we start initially breadboarding our nodes, we can seamlessly use Eagle to prep for our PCB fabrication. I also want to do some research on the battery requirements so we have a more scoped out idea of how we will be addressing them. We also know that the design presentation is coming up and we can start planning out the slides and fixing any details that need to be considered from questions that were brought up in the proposal presentation. In regards to our schedule, I am on track with respect to the research but a bit behind with respect to ordering the sensors. We plan to get out on order on Monday so we can get back on track.