Following up from last week’s report, I made sketches of the physical design of the bracelet.
Drawing these made me think of some discussion topics for our group meeting.
- Are we proceeding with designing the bracelet to use 2 batteries in series rather than one large battery? (Yes– the bracelet can have a more even weight distribution and more easily meet size requirements if it uses two small batteries.)
- How will wire management work? Now that most of our design will be on a PCB, the major wire connection remaining is the battery cable.
- How many LEDs do we want to use? Because an array of NeoPixel LEDs can be connected to one output pin on the microcontroller, we can include more than the 6 LEDs we originally planned to have; however, more LEDs will draw more current, which will then decrease the battery life. Similarly, we can afford to have more than 3 (digital) microphones now, but it remains to be seen if this is necessary for our design.
In another follow-up to last week’s assignment, I created an optional Google Form survey for the music studio. Results from the Google Form seem to indicate that potential users would want a device with a long battery life. From the form answers, the longest duration of a music session could be 4 or 6 hours. Involvement with the music studio means that our use case is now more specific; we are aiming our product toward people who are regularly creating music and want to make sure that their practice/rehearsal environments are safe. With these two assignments completed, my progress matches our schedule.
This week, I submitted orders for the Beetle microcontroller (https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2778.html) and NeoPixel LEDs (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3094) that we intend to use in our bracelet. Since we need to have all design decisions finalized by Sunday at midnight, which includes knowing all components that we will buy, I am assigning myself the task of submitting all orders for materials in the coming week. (I also changed this website’s header image to a picture from Pixabay, which is free to use.)