At the beginning of this past week, I worked primarily on researching the dimensions of the parts that we requested, as they had not been ordered until Tuesday. I used these dimensions to begin mocking up a CAD model of the door lock cover that will house the electronics for the door lock, as seen in the first image below. Before I move to 3D printing the door lock cover, I want to test the door lock electronics and get them to a functional state so that I can 3D print with certainty that the parts we use will fit in the 3D print. Thankfully, the door lock parts came in Thursday so that I could begin testing and assembly. Friday and Saturday were spent breadboarding the keypad and Seeed Studio Xiao microcontroller as well as beginning to write code for the microcontroller, as seen in the last two images. I had to spend most of the time researching how to get the right board onto the Arduino IDE and what libraries I needed for the I2C communication between the keypad and microcontroller, as I have very little (or fading) experience with how to use I2C. I ended today (getting kicked out of Techspark at 6 pm is too early) writing a simple test script using the Wires.h library to test my current understanding of how to retrieve the information being passed from the keypad. This is so that I can build upon this with the actual functionality we require once I gain an understanding of how to code the basics.
I feel that I am currently on schedule. According to the Gantt chart, Brooke and I should have had the PCB design almost done at this point; however, we decided to push this back and move up the testing and assembly of the lock and mat, as that is a higher priority.
Next week, I will be continuing to work on the door lock, getting a working script written for the microcontroller to talk with the keypad that can be modified to include communicating with the mat once it has also been made. If I can get the simple script written before spring break, I think I will be in a good place for when we return in March.
