What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).
- Last week when testing we realized that some of the Picos were not functioning so on Monday I did a thorough testing of all the Pico and power pins combination to identify the Picos that are not working. I found that for 4 of the Picos the UART0 was not working (the TX/RX did not receive signal even when directly connected), so I came up with a backup plan of soldering female header pins to UART1 and changing the code to utilize UART1 for communication instead. Afterwards, I realized towards the end of the week during E2E testing that the UART1 pins I chose conflicted with the SPI pins used for the block LCD. Alexis and I tried to explore using alternative SPI pins but it took up too much time and was not successful. We ended up switching back to another set of UART0 and got all 8 blocks fully functioning. I tested them individually with the embedded controller test code and the blocks were able to load words, respond to query and change color.
- Alexis built the placeholder positions for each of the male pogo pins on the plywood. After she built the prototype grid, I worked on testing the grid and adjusted some of the wiring and circuitry according to the embedded controller code. I also tested all the grid pogo pins to make sure they were working.
- I also worked on editing the Pico code for the LCD in terms of receiving color commands. I also adjusted the display font size based on the word length which is something we realized after we started testing that some words were too long to fit on the screen.
- I also started working on the embedded controller integration with the webapp which has already been loaded onto the RPi. I installed the necessary libraries and tested the POST request being sent from the embedded controller to the webapp backend when the button is pressed. I also configured two buttons using two different GPIO pins, and two category row LCDs for the grid by changing the I2C address of one of them. This ensures we have an entire hardware setup we need for our MVP fully functioning.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
- As of today, my schedule is on track since we have completed the prototyping of 4 blocks and moved on to 8 blocks very quickly. I have also completed all embedded controller code and put together all the hardware electrical components necessary for our MVP.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
- I hope to work on making sure the hardware is reliable since the blocks are not well connected all the time. However we have checked that all the hardware is working and the code is valid as well. I hope to ensure that there is more robustness in our product for gameplay purposes.