This week we had our interim demo which we believe went pretty well, and we hope to keep moving forward with integration between more of our individual components. Earlier in the week, we spent a lot of time doing initial integration for the sake of our demo where we were able to create a fixed path and broadcast which node had detected a fire and what that meant for the rest of the nodes in the path. We were able to recalculate a new path based on that fire-detecting node and once the fire was no longer detected, we were able to change back to a different path. We also had integration between the LEDs and the displays, as we were able to display directions and a highlighted path based on a hardcoded set of nodes and edges. We hope to be able to move away from this hardcoded testing to be able to incorporate real smoke and temperature data and have the paths reroute.
Our risks continue to be integration between separate, individual components as well as the PCB fabrication that we are still trying to finalize the details on. Our current plan of action is to reach out to Brandon Gonzalez, a student of Professor Carley’s, that has worked with this area before to gain some insight and hopefully move forward with the fabrication of our own PCBs. However, we don’t want to get too stuck on this and spend too much time so we want a backup plan of either generic solderable protoboards or just using JLCPCB to send one out in parallel to us trying to figure out how to do it ourselves. One other risk is that our PCB is looking like it might need 2 layers. This would increase the complexity of our PCB and may make it harder to manufacture on our own. This may encourage us to look into shipping.
One small change that we made is that we are no longer planning on having power going from the wall to a jack on our PCB. This was our original plan, but we realized that this was very unnecessary due to the fact that the ESP already has a micro USB port that we can use. This way, we can just allow our PCB to be driven by the 5V pins on the ESP32. Another smallAnother change is the number of batteries we may be using. Originally, it seemed like we were going to use 3 batteries for the LED nodes and 6 for the LCB nodes. However, after testing, it seems that we may be able to use 4 for both of these. It also seems like we may not use the 3.3V pin to power our ESP32 because we were having trouble getting this to work, whereas using the 5V pin worked well.
For our interim demo, we also made some Gantt chart edits that involved pushing the PCB fabrication and design further back as well as adding in some more achievable subtasks by breaking down bigger items to be able to make more progress toward our final demo.