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).
I have been working on assembly for the 8 additional blocks that we had, mostly laser cutting, hot gluing, spraying the blocks, and soldering all the pogo pins with the 6 pin header since these pogo pins were surface mounts. I also helped Nicole to create a 2nd test bed and created a “bridge wire” from the main board to the mini-breadboard of the second testbed so that we can daisy chain and get the wires we needed from the RPi5. I also worked on planning out how we would cut out all of our wood to assemble the grid with a CAD and researched into how another team was incorporating their pogo pins into their design. I came up with a new 3D printed pogo pin holder to ensure that the pogo pins are placed onto the grid in an organized and systematic way so that we can easily assemble the grid without variability. I did box joints for the grid so that we can apply wood glue to hold it in place and I also made the cut outs for the button and the LCDs. I made some design changes which was to reduce the spacing between rows and move the row LCDs to the right side of the board above the buttons. I also helped come up with some trade-off studies to prove our design choices as well as created a survey that we will ask users to fill out during user testing.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
I am currently slightly behind schedule as I was supposed to finish the grid but we expanded to 16 blocks and I also had to come up with a solution for the pogo pins. Since I have the files now I will be doing an initial cardboard cut out to confirm the design and then I’ll be able to assemble the grid itself.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
I will have the grid assembled, help debug the 16 block set up, and complete the user testing / verification tests that I have for the parts that I am responsible.
Verification Testing
I will be performing the battery life endurance test which we have already been doing informally and the blocks’ batteries have been able to last for weeks with several days of 2 – 4 hours of being on while we are testing. I will also be working on the trade-off tests for checking different delay times for the upload_words function as well as experimenting with different UART baud rates to show how we came to the decision to use certain specs. The blocks were my subsystems that I am responsible for and I will be weighing and measuring each block to ensure that it meets the requirements of being <4"x4"x4" and <400g. We purchased blocks that were already 3.3"x3.3"x3.3" so the measurements are already satisfied and I will just need a scale for measure but I also did this informally and it seems to meet this requirement. I will also be working on UART Send & Receive to test how 10 words are sent from RPi5 and using the time module we will collect data on the latency it takes from the upload word query to receiving an ACK on RPi 5 side. This will be performed on all of the blocks. In addition I will my other teammates by writing any scripts that help us collect our data and I will be recruiting people to take part in our user study as well as come up with more questions that would allow us to show how Connexus compares to NYT Connections.