This past week our team has spent the majority of time working on our design report. We realized that in writing our sections, that some required a lot more detail and consideration than others. For example, we wanted to ensure that we had a thoughtful trade studies section as we had iterated through multiple design choices and we wanted to explain our thinking process behind those decisions. We also wanted to work on improving based on the comments we received from our design presentation with regards to describing the 2 MVPs: the LED nodes and LCD nodes as well as working on improving our block diagrams. We also knew that because we have a lot of moving parts, we wanted to be specific about our system implementation and testing sections so we spent extra time there.
Beyond just the report, I worked on interfacing with the ESP32. When doing a lot of research on the best ways to program, it was actually recommended to utilize the Arduino IDE. This made it a lot easier and decreased the learning curve. I also researched other IDEs that are compatible with the ESP32 so we have others that we can use, but because our team has the most experience with Arduino, it makes the most sense to start there. It took a little bit of time resetting and rebooting the ESP32s to be in the correct mode but once I got past that issue it wasn’t too bad. I made documentation on setting up and using the ESP32 for the first time so that the rest of my team can follow those steps without difficulty. That is something we are trying to work on as time is making good documentation for issues that we run into so that we can save our other teammates time in the future and not waste time on repeating the same mistakes. Now that I was able to set up the ESP32, I tried to collect temperature data once again but this time with the ESP32 as our microcontroller instead of the Arduino. Attached we have a photo of how we wired up the board to our temperature sensor.
We also received our displays last week and wanted to start interfacing with them as soon as possible. When Aidan and I were doing research on how to program them, we found that the software necessary is only available on Windows. Because I have a Mac, I might need to look into virtual machines or just work together with Aidan to ensure that we are able to figure out how to wire it up and work with them quickly. We also decided to use MQ2 sensors for our smoke sensors. We received them last week as well and they are not quite what we expected. They are a lot bigger and unfortunately, do not even have a datasheet to know which pins are what. We found its use in one circuit which makes use of another chip so either we figure out if we need to order those chips as well or just use a reliable MQ2 sensor that we will order quickly so we can test and implement them into our nodes.
In the upcoming week, I want to figure out how to program the display and figure out what pins on the ESP32 are necessary to do so. I want to be able to get more comfortable with using the display so when it comes to integrating the pathfinding instructions, we can do so without so much difficulty. I also want to ensure that we order the rest of our temperature sensors and smoke sensors by Monday because we really need to start interfacing with them and building our nodes. I also want to utilize the LEDs to experiment with how we want to display our path directions and use the ESP32 to specify arbitrary NESW commands that reflect what the LEDs are doing. With all of these separate hardware components, I think it would be great to start planning our the PCB design as well or at least start designing it and learning more about Eagle.
My schedule was a bit pushed back as well due to the design report and I am mostly on track except for being able to figure out how to output to the display. In this task, I am a bit behind. This task will be a huge priority in the coming week in order to get back on track and not cause any more delays.