Earlier in the week, I spent a lot of time working on the ethics assignment. I thoroughly read each of the two articles and dedicated effort to answering the required questions carefully. Then I reflected on the questions that we had relating to our project. Beyond just the ethics assignment, I wanted to ensure that I got the rest of the hardware we needed such as the remaining temp sensors, smoke sensors, and batteries since we made some minor design changes last week. The forms have all been sent out and approved and they all come from reliable suppliers so we anticipate for them to come in sometime next week.
Beyond just the logistics, Aidan and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to program out displays. Like I had mentioned last week, the Nextion display software can only be run on a Windows machine so we knew that we were going to have to work together. Earlier in the week, we were having difficulty figuring out how to interface with the code so we made a plan to keep researching separately and then set up meetings throughout the week to try what we had researched on the side. Yesterday, we were able to display a floor plan image of Wean on our display. At the beginning of the week we were unsure how we would be communicating with the display through our laptop as well as the ESP32 knowing that the microcontroller would be the one powering the display. After some more digging around, we found that we need to place the build file in micro sd card that is stored in the display board. The build file would also contain the image that we want to show once it is placed in the Nextion program. After, we power the display with the micro sd, we learned that we would then need to power it off and remove the sd card and restart for the image to be outputted to the display as shown below.
We wanted to keep experimenting with being able to interface with the display by writing code that would programmatically determine which image to show. In our test case, we wanted to be able to simply flip between two sets of images. We had found an example use of an ESP32 interfacing with a Nextion display while collecting various weather related data that would determine what image to show on the display. We altered this code a fair amount to simplify it for our test case, but we unfortunately were unsuccessful in getting the desired outcome of alternating images on a timer. We hope to keep working on this because for the sake of our project, within our pathfinding code we would need to be able to source through images of potential paths where the Arduino code would return some set of indices that are equivalent to the best path and have these indices relate to the image to display. Furthermore, to implement our complex design it would require more experience with the Nextion display software in terms of utilizing their other features besides images that could be of value to us when highlighting the best path on the image.
In the upcoming week, I would like to keep experimenting with getting familiar with programming the display and continue the test case we started with. If the smoke sensors come in next week, I want to start testing them and see what the range is like for placing a candle in its vicinity. Furthermore, because we ordered just one breakout board just so we can figure out the pin layout for the sensors, I want to test with and without the board as eventually we will be moving toward PCBs in which case the breakout board for the smoke sensors will be unnecessary. That being said, I want to make more progress on my Eagle research or look into what Professor Mukherjee had mentioned about making the in house PCBs with the copper boards during our weekly meeting this week.
I am a bit behind schedule in terms of working with Jason to receive and handle messages from the pathfinding. We are behind on a bit of the networking aspects like talking between nodes and being able to send alert messages to other nodes. With this, we are going to push these tasks to the following week and make them a priority as these are the first step in integrating our multiple moving parts to be able to work together.