I spent some time searching for small microcontrollers. There seemed to be many promising results at first, but I\u2019ll go into more detail below:<\/p>\n
Conclusion: although these candidates ended up being eliminated, these possibilities were still important in helping us narrow down our use cases and think more deeply about implementation. The first big takeaway is that we\u2019ve proved that we only need 1 LED pin to individually control a whole array of lights (with the help of the libraries listed in the Gemma pendant link tutorial), which also helped us discover that NEOPixels were a nicer alternative to LEDs. Second, we had a good discussion about ranking what we value most in our parts, such as whether Bluetooth or LEDs were more important, and also how to charge the battery. Initially, we thought it would be fine to take the battery out to charge, but since the battery wires are likely going to be soldered to the switch, that\u2019s probably not possible. This isn\u2019t something we would\u2019ve thought of if it weren\u2019t for comparing all the different features of the microcontrollers we had available and ranking what we valued in our use cases.<\/p>\n
I think the project schedule is on-time with the new Gantt chart changes, now that we have our main parts decided upon. However, we shouldn\u2019t slow down the pace given that it did take changing the Gantt chart.<\/p>\n
Next week, I plan to start finding 3D models of all the components we will be using, and trying out different arrangements to see how they\u2019ll fit together, so we have an estimate and can be prepared before parts arrive. We can also analyze responses from our user survey to see if there are other design implementations we can narrow down, and go from there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent some time searching for small microcontrollers. There seemed to be many promising results at first, but I\u2019ll go into more detail below: Gemma is 1\u201d diameter, so nice and small. In addition, it comes with a tutorial for how to control a bunch of Neopixels in different colors with just 1 pin, so … <\/p>\n