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).
This week I worked on integration test, error handling on the pico, font size changes, and on spraying the blocks. I was integration testing the website and grid with Nicole and we discovered an edge case where the web app seemed to have errored out while attempting to retrieve a definition for a word that does not exist in the Merriam Webster API. This sparked a move towards doing error handling across the board as we found some additional bugs during our Wednesday meeting with Professor Mukherjee and our TA Ankit. We discovered that there was an issue while the RPi 5 was uploading the words to the blocks and if any of the blocks are moved out of their position slightly during that transmission, there seems to be an bug where the buffer seems to append on the word retrieval during the upload and ACK phase which causes part of our command that we received from the RPi 5 to be displayed on the LCD and appended to the current word itself. I worked on doing error handling in regards to making the queries have a more strict format and dynamically removing any bad data we receive during a transmission from Rpi 5. This created a more robust system for us and handles potential edge cases where we receive bad data and shouldn’t be displaying it on the LCD. In addition, I added dynamic font size changes where words that have a length greater than 9 will decrease a font size down and then greater than 14 will decrease another font size down. This handles another edge case for lengthy words. In regards to the blocks I worked on spraying those with a frosted coat to cover the circuitry and they look great.
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 need to assemble and cut the grid but we were discussing the best routes to help guide the alignment of the blocks to the pogo pins with the additional magnets that we purchased. I did purchase the wood that we need for the grid this week but I need to make the dxf files for laser cutting and assembling. I will be working on this tomorrow (Sunday) and will laser cut by Monday.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
I will have the grid assembled by next week. We also are expanding to 16 blocks and so I will be working on manufacturing those: soldering battery holders to adapters, soldering pogo pins onto perf boards + soldering on the wires for those, soldering the double sided male/female header pins, laser cutting the blocks, and spraying them.