Author: Gary Bailey

Progress

This week, I made more progress toward writing the boilerplate firmware needed to get the microcontroller to communicate with our various peripherals. This includes another pass at the SPI transaction handling for the display, and a preliminary serial setup for receiving GPS data.

Here’s a screenshot of my newly rewritten function for efficiently updating the display by sending only changed lines:

Pacing

I’m a bit behind schedule in terms of producing our actual prototype board, but I have at least shown the fact that the various hardware we’ve been planning to integrate will work together, which was needed in order for Carson to start designing the board schematic.

Planning

Next week our GPS module should arrive, so I can actually properly do GPS integration rather than sending test data. After that point, I should finally be done with our “breadboard prototype” step, at least in terms of firmware.

Earlier this week, I worked with my teammates to review possible paths to follow for our energy harvesting design, and also worked on composing a purchasing list for our initial prototypes.

Later in the week, I started working on the breadboard prototype for the watch, along with the firmware: most of this time (around 9 hours) has gone into setting up our build environment and debugging the peripherals we need to use in the firmware. So far the display is implemented, and I’m also currently working on the UART for the GPS and the real-time clock. I am a little bit behind schedule as we had originally planned for me to finish with the breadboard prototype this week, but we’d failed to account for when we’d be able to order parts. However, I don’t think this should be an issue since I’ve been using my time to get ahead on the firmware (my task for next week), and progress should be faster on said firmware with Twain helping next week. Once the remaining parts we need for the breadboard prototype arrive (mainly the GPS), it should be pretty quick to finish the prototype (the wiring is pretty much just a few UART lines) so we can start testing the power systems.