At the moment, we realized that after our weekly meeting with Professor Mukherjee and Kaashvi that we are in a better place than we thought for our interim demo. We, however, don’t want to fall behind so we are aiming to keep the efforts on integration high as we keep progressing toward and beyond our interim demo as we still stand by the fact that it will be difficult to combine each individual demo. Currently, we feel that the most significant risk would be the fact that our batteries have not arrived yet. Our rechargeable battery circuit is a part of each individual node and we need to ensure that our node works as a whole in terms of power draw and designing appropriately fitting PCBs. Regarding the Eagle design, we can just do the rest of the design without the batteries for now and then add it in, but ideally, we could get it all done as soon as possible.
Another risk could be the making of our own PCBs as we mentioned in our last report. After our weekly meeting, we went to TechSpark to check out the machines that will print them on copper sheets. We have a copy of the manual and we know that we still need to create an Eagle file, but it would be great to get in touch with people who have used it as we are very new to it and will most likely have a lot of questions. We need to figure out very soon whether this approach of making our own PCBs is going to work for us, as the window of time for ordering a PCB from one of the standard manufacturers is running out quickly.
One other risk that we ran into is that our code is written to run on its own, not to be integrated with other code. This will just require some more time on our part to ensure that the code will be written in a way that it can all interact. Once we are able to accommodate this, we can begin integrating our code.
This week we have our interim demo on Wednesday and we plan to spend a lot of time before this working on some more in-depth integration with the displays and the communication/pathfinding to put us in a better position. There have been no changes in our timeline or system layout, so no updating is needed on that front.