This week, I spent the majority of the time working with Jason and Neha on our design report. One of the contributions that I made to this report was the implementation details. Here I provided more specific details that added onto our system architecture section. Additionally, there were sections that we all worked on together. Also, putting this design report together forced us to make some decisions that we were wavering on, such as the batteries. I feel that, now that we have finished this report, we have a much better sense of a concrete direction that we will be proceeding in. Now that our design is complete, we will be able to focus on creating the systems involved in our project.
One decision that I made while we were writing our report was to switch out our batteries. Originally, we were using LiPO batteries with a capacity of 1000mAh and a voltage of 3.6V. However, after more research into the power consumption of our displays, we found that this voltage would not be high enough. We had previously assumed that this capacity would not be enough, based on our calculations, but now that we also found the voltage would not be high enough, we felt that we needed to pivot our choice to a different battery. I found that we could use NiMH with a voltage of 1.2V. After spending a decent amount of time researching the possibility of continuously charging LIPO batteries, I could not find any documentation about a safe way to do this. For NiMH, I was able to find this information very easily, which made me much more confident about the ability to continuously charge these batteries. We found these for a cheap enough price to stay in our budget, and by using 3 of these batteries for our LED nodes and 6 for our LCD nodes, we would be able to successfully power our nodes. Additionally, the capacity of these batteries is 2000mAh, which satisfies our battery capacity requirement.
Lastly, I also spent some time getting started with our displays. First I downloaded the software required to use these displays. Then I began doing some research on how these boards are programmed. These are the sites that I found and am planning on using when I begin to use these boards:
https://www.instructables.com/Nextion-Display-Interface-With-ESP-32-Four-Relay-B/
My schedule was pushed back slightly because of the design report. This took more time than I had previosly thought it would, so I was unable to get to programming the displays. However, there are no current tasks that are blocked by this. I am planning on finishing this task this week, and this will not cause any further delays to our schedule. We also do not have the boards communicating yet, which is behind schedule. However I also believe that we can accomplish this task during this coming week as well. Last week, I had multiple midterms, and this along with the design report occupied much of my time, but now that these are over, I am confident that I will be able to use the extra time to catch up on this work. Next week, I am also planning on working with Jason to get the Zigbee network setup, assuming that the zigbee cards have arrived. Lastly, I also plan on getting a couple of our ESP32s running on wifi, so that I can test out the distributed pathfiniding code that I have written for them. This week, I am also hoping to get some testing done with real fire from a candle to further test our sensors.