This week, we made the change from having a button on the ring to communicate with the pendant to tapping the ring on the pendant. This is because the lack of availability of active RFIDs that support HF RFID protocol (most websites do not have any in stock). With the passive tag, we could have found a way to short the coils within the tag, but with only a few tags we can use and how tiny they are, we thought this would be too risky. Other methods such as covering the tag with metal would be too unreliable.
As a result, we decided to go forward with this design decision. We also have completed the geofence as well as the cellular module (removing the requirement for a phone).
We received our PCB this week and started assembling it. There was an issue with the power source and voltage regular but the PCB itself was designed correctly. We will try to fix these issues as soon as possible so we can have it ready for the demo.
Our group has learned a lot about our respective parts. We learned a lot about making PCBs with autodesk fusion, and effective ways to putting the components onto fusion even without a given file from the manufacturer. We also learned a lot about RFIDs, with the different frequencies, protocols, programming and calibrating tags. For newer knowledge such as this, youtube was a good starting point, but to get more specific knowledge (especially with our usage of more obscure parts), we learned to be better at reading datasheets. They may be long, but they should be read through slowly as they are pretty dense with information.
For the development of the app, some of us have never used flutter, so youtube and the flutter documentation were very helpful. For the members of our group who use windows, they had to figure out the android side of the app with android studio, while the others used ios with xcode. Additionally, we learned about different types of microphones, such as unidirecrtional, digital, compression, etc. We also learned about ESP32s and managing different variants of them, baud rates, etc.