- What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
- The most significant risk that could jeopardize the success of the project is the communication between the RPi 5, pico, and LCD not working properly. If this communication doesn’t work, then we need to rethink the entire embedded communication portion of the project. To manage this risk, we have tested basic UART communication between the RPi and pico, and SPI communication between the pico and the LCD, and found both to be working separately. We plan to test the full path of communication before moving forward with building more blocks. If we run into issues with our single block prototype, our contingency plan is to swap out elements based on what is not working. We do not expect the RPi5 and pico communication to fail since these are widely-used components that many people have successfully used in other projects . Most likely, if the LCDs are the problem, we will pivot to the familiar RGB backlight I2C LCDs from 18-100.
- Additionally, there are physical design risks such as the acrylic blocks being too thick for the pogo pins to stick out of (thus preventing a good connection to the grid’s pogo pins), the fact that the USB-C ports on the batteries require us to drill right on the seam of the battery holder in order to make an accessible charging port, and the fact that the LCDs have female header pins for the picos that force us to solder wires onto very small contact points on the LCD manufacturer’s board, which could be less secure and take longer to fabricate. To mitigate these risks, we will fabricate 1 block to see if these physical design specs will work out. Afterwards, we will adjust our components and construction plan accordingly if certain approaches or components do not work out.
- Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward? Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.
- No changes were made to the existing design of the system since last week, when we fleshed out the details for our design presentation. However, we have updated our schedule to take into account shipping/ordering delays in retrieving our parts. As part of our risk mitigation plan, we are ordering parts in batches to make sure we don’t spend all our budget on parts that won’t work for our project. However, this strategy increases the waiting time between stages of our project as we have to wait for parts to arrive every time we order. This updated schedule can be seen in our Gantt chart.
- This is also the place to put some photos of your progress or to brag about a component you got working
- We setup, implemented, tested, and verified that UART works between RPi5 and RPi pico using Micropython and pogo pins.
- We were able to get SPI LCD displays working with the pico.
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- We finished implementing most of web app frontend + backend (game controller just needs to call backend API functions to control game flow display on web app) — still need to use Merriam-Webster API instead of free Dictionary API.
- We tested and verified that I2C works between RPi5 and row LCDs.
