This week I prepped for my final presentation and worked on debugging the PCB. We ran into a few issues with the PCB. The first one being that the 5V and 3V regulator did not work on the PCB. When We soldered a new PCB with just the voltage regulaors and no loads, the 5V regulator ended up working but the 3V3 regulator still didn’t work as it outputted the same voltage it got in. I did some tests including powering it with a different battery source  (another esp) but that didn’t work either. Another issue was that everytime i fully charged the lithium ion battery and plugged it into the PCB the battery drained almost immediately. This meant that either something was wrong with the battery or the board itself.  When I recharged the battery and plugged it directly into a breadboard instead the battery was fine which meant it was a board issue. Furthermore when i soldered wires to the the 3V3 regulator and connected it with the battery, it was able to regulate the voltage down to 3.3. Because of these issues with the PCB and with the demo being next Friday, we moved to put all our components on a small breadboard, instead. While this isn’t ideal, we want to prioritize getting everything to work. Next week we are finishing up the breadboard and trying to get RFID and the mic working by Friday.

This week I spent a lot of time improving certain parts the interface of the app as well as implementing the ability to actually send text messages to the inputted emergency contacts when a button is pressed and the ESP 32 sends an alert to the companion app. I also spent time creating an “alert dialog” that upon recieving a “alert!” from the esp, prompts a popup on the app asking the user to confirm or cancel the alert. If confirmed the text will be sent, and if not it gets disregarded. Additionally I began working on the geofencing interface. Thus far I have created a preference page where the user can input their home address as their reference point (using google API’s to auto-predict the address as they type) . Once they input their home address and the latitude and longitude coordinates get stored. I also have to add a button for the user to input their desired geofence radius. After this the next step is to repeatedly get the current lat and long coords and then use compute the Haversine Distance to see if we have exceeded our geofence range -> to then alert the companion app.

To verify this has been working we have been testing sending an alert with a button on the breadboard connected to the ESP.  We test when the bluetooth is disconnected whether the message has been sent via the cellular chip and if it is connected does the companion app receive the message. We also have been inputting different number of emergency contacts to see when sending a message it goes to all users. I have also repeatedly sent messages to see if my alert dialog box works (not just once and that it keeps working no matter if i cancel or confirm). There are still currently some timing issues that I am looking to fix.

I have attached a Demo with my progress below: April 6th Status Report Demo

This week I have been working on creating a bluetooth connection between our companion app and the ESP to present during our interim demo.  I’ve been working on the companion app side via flutter and I have been able to successfully establish a connection with the ESP. The next step we wanted to accomplish was to write information to the ESP about certain contacts we want to send messages to etc. To do this I created a dropdown menu allowing the user to create 3 emergency contacts. When they select “enter contact _x” they are prompted to input a phone number and “submit” upon submitting, this information gets utf8 encoded and sent to the esp in a message saying update preferences SOSx [phone number].  This message is then able to be broken down by the esp. I tested the bluetooth connection and data transmission to the esp 32 and it works successfully. I have attached a demo video showing the process. I will continue working on the PCB next week and try to get to some geofencing.

Demo Video

This week I continued working on the schematic and redesigning parts of our PCB. We had a meeting with Tamal on Friday to discuss our current schematic, and Olivia and I met today to make changes accordingly discuss what parts we need to return and now buy based on our conversation with him. I initially had most of the pieces on the schematic as components to solder on, but looking at the pieces and datasheets these pieces were already on a daughter board board, so all we need to include on the actual PCB are header pins that we can mechanically place the boards into. We also upon discussion got a new digital microphone as opposed to the analog one we previously had. In addition I added decoupling capacitors to all the components on the board and modified the schematic to correctly use the voltage regulators. I replaced the voltage regulator I had for the motor from linear to switching as to not waste power. I also added header pins to connect our external 11V battery. We are stepping it down to 5V using another linear regulator and connecting that to the battery pin of our miniESP. We also are planning to return our cell module and antenna and we are ordering a new cellular dev kit instead. this already comes with a built in PCB so we discussing how we want to deal with this. (glue it onto our existing PCB and then connect physical wires from the header pins of our PCB to the cell PCB to power and transmit information? )We need to figure that out.  We also are unsure of how to connect the recharge pin of our battery. I hope to have this schematic done by tomorrow so we can send it again for feedback. I have attached the “unfinished” changes below:

Pendant PCB w_o Cellular 2 Copy

The week before spring break I spent a lot of time working on our Design Report and in doing so now have a better understanding of how to articulate our project and our goals to our audience as well as explain certain decisions we made throughout our design process. I also spent a lot of time based on feedback from the design review creating a concise block diagram to very clearly visually explain how each sub-component of the overall product works together and the flow of alerting SOS. Progress on the companion app remains the same as I am still looking into how to save information (from our trigger settings) and pass it back through pages for the companion app so we can use that information and pass it to our actual jewelry device, as well as researching packages for acquiring GPS location for setting the location radius triggers. Through working on the design report we have also have a more complete list of parts so I am working on finding their part files/a way for me to put those parts into our pcb design.

In the next week I hope to have information on how to achieve the 2 companion app features and make progress on our pcb design.

This week I continued working on the Companion app. I added a temporary logo to our app created multiple pages within the app, one for trigger preferences and one for setting emergency contacts (with more pages within those). For the emergency contacts page I did research on how to get access/permission to retrieve the user’s contacts via the app and displaying the contact information. I then incorporated this into the app so we are able to make use of the person’s contact’s that are already there. Now I need to implement being able to add a new contact in and how to store this information in our app to be sent/used by the jewelrly if necessary. I think my progress on the companion app is on schedule, but I hope to start the PCB design this week

In the next week I hope to get figured out how to save information (from our trigger settings) and pass it back through pages for the companion app so we can use that information and pass it to our actual jewelry device. In addition, I will do some more research on packages for acquiring GPS location for setting the location radius triggers.

I also want to get started and make significant progress on the necklace PCB design. In order to get this completed we need to spend time as a team finalizing components/dimensions of each component to draw up the design and get it ordered.

I have attached a video of the progress made on the app:

App Progress Link

This week we spent a lot of time figuring out the details on our design implementation. The biggest discussion of the week was figuring out how we want to connect our ring and pendant and send signals between the two. We initially had come up with communicating between the ring and pendant using bluetooth, but we set up a meeting with Professor Bain on Thursday to figure out alternative options such as an implementation involving RFID. Our discussion was very helpful and he provided insight on  how to  implement passive/non-passive RFID communication between our ring and our pendant. We’ve since decided to move forward with that approach.

Based on our previous Gantt chart we are a little behind, but we have since updated our chart to account for more realistic time allocated to research and coming up with a well thought out design plan, as well as figure out what components we need to order in order to ensure a smoother process later on.

This week I was able to set up and get starting on creating a companion app. I spent time familiarizing myself with Flutter dealing with setup/build issues and was able to create a Home Page for the application. I didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted to due to heavy workload and athletics this week; however, I hope to add more details to the homepage and create navigation to other pages for our different application tasks like trigger settings and contact preferences. I have attached a picture of the home page below:

This week we spent our time on the proposal presentations. We prepared by working on the slide deck as a team. In addition my teammates and I also noted what specific components are needed and want to discuss with our TA to request some components/order some components online. We also want to discuss the possibility of using a flexible PCB board for our project (ring). Given that our ring is small sized, we need to be able to have some flexibility with our electronics in order to shape the board into a ring, so it can later be encased in the desired material.  Along with the ring we also need to discuss how we want to shape the pendant in order to be subtle and fit all the necessary components. Once we have a discussion about this we can begin to create the PCBs. In addition to the components, I plan to start working on the companion app framework  on Flutter and hope to have the basic framework done by the end of this week.