One of the first things I did this week was my ethics assignment. I felt that this assignment was helpful because it focused on some of the less obvious impacts that engineering projects can have. For example, at first glance I would not assume that a highway infrastructure could have political implications. This assignment helped me to see that ethics goes beyond power consumption, pollution, etc., and can be less obvious but still very impactful. I also had the opportunity to look into some statistics for generative artificial intelligence that I found very interesting.
There were some parts that we had to order this week, so I ordered the batteries that we needed. We decided to scale down the amount of nodes that we are planning on using, so this also helped us save on the number of batteries that we had to order.
After this, Neha and I spent time working to get our display working. When we first received this display, we were all at a loss for how we were supposed to program it. Initially, we thought that, because there was an application that we had to install on our laptop, we would just plug the board into our laptops and program it through this application. However, then we realized that the adapter for our laptop only supported the board with power, so we knew there had to be a different way. After researching some tutorials, we found that we would create the display code on our laptops, and then upload it to a micro SD card that we could then put into the display. After this, we were able to get a picture of a floor plan showing on our display, which was one of the main things that I wanted to get accomplished this week. After this, Neha and I researched how we would interact with the display through our ESP32, and we found that we would be able to set state variables through the TX pin on our ESP32. We worked at this for some time, but were unable to get it working. We’re planning on working more on this next week.
Another thing that I spent some time working on this week was the communication between ESP32s. I found a tutorial online for connecting two ESP32s through an Ethernet connection. After spending some time working on this, I feel that I will need to do some more research for it in order to get it working. I was able to get the code compiled and uploaded, but for some reason the microcontrollers were unable to begin the TCP connection.
This is the tutorial I was using:
https://esp32io.com/tutorials/communication-between-two-esp32
Getting something to be uploaded to our display was one of my main goals for this week, so finishing that was on schedule for me. One aspect that I have fallen behind in is the network communication. However, I know that Jason has been working on this as well and has made some progress. I feel that this week we will be able to make up for this work. I do not have many tasks in the PCB area right now so this should give me more time to work on the network tasks.
This coming week I would like to get the communication working and have messages sent between the nodes. I would also like to get to the point where we can change what is shown on the display based on our sensor readings. One other thing that I would like to complete next week is to write the message code for my distributed path planning software. This will rely on us having a good understanding of the wifi communication, but I feel that this is something we will be able to do this week.