This week, I spent the majority of my time working with Nick to finalize the hardware design. This consisted of making a clear list of materials with digikey links to identify which components were available to implement our design and ideas. The list can be seen here:
This process included going through our design from our design report/presentation, listing out all of the components of our pcb (and other things we needed), and finding the proper components in DigiKey based on desired functionality. We found all the components we needed and Nick put in the list mid-week. In addition, I have continued progressing on my PCB design. I had to watch a few videos on how to interact with KiCad as it is a new EDA tool. However, I was able to successfully download several of the components from DigiKeys and put them in my schematic. Now that I have overcome that initial obstacle, I am fairly confident in wrapping up the design within the next week or so. Nick and I also met outside of class time to decide any additional hardware changes we need to make before sending our PCB for fabrication. Last week, during our meeting with Professor and TA, we were told to consider some hardware to ensure that our input and output voltage match what is needed by the guitar input and the output. One concern that came up in our meeting was anticipating the proper hardware for this and including it in our PCB. We decided that we were going to have a separate breadboard (very small) inside our casing to handle this to prevent further delay in getting our PCB out. I also completed Steps 1-2 of the Ethics assignment and discussed Step 3 with my team. We have made our Slack submission and are ready for the discussion on Monday.
I am starting to fall slightly behind in my progress. I should be able to catch up given the progress of this week as I now have all components in my KiCad library and simply have to wire everything and double check the Daisy Seed Specs. I should be able to wrap this up hopefully within the next week. In addition, Nick and I will be putting together the prototype next week on breadboard or devboard (we have both – depends on which we find easier). All components should be coming next week. Our goal is to have an initial physical implementation of our hardware design within the next week.