Category: Nadia’s Status Reports

Since the last update, we were able to get the clone functionality working and successfully demo cloning and transmitting a LG TV signal during the interim demo. Additionally, I was able to make significant progress in finalizing the functionality for the custom receiver. This involved coming up with a custom IR signal to avoid accidentally aliasing existing signals.

I remain on schedule, though my workload may increase from needing to prepare a more polished and “real-world” demo for the custom receiver for the final presentation. Next steps are continuing to improve the custom receiver functionality and preparing for the final presentation.

Since we have our interim demo next week, I spent this week primarily preparing firmware for both the integration test with the wand chassis and CNN as well as further testing the IR transmission between our wand and the custom receiver. More specifically, this involved doing isolated tests with just the CNN and just the IR transmission as we tried to integrate it on the V2 of the PCB. Though it functions on boards, there are still a few kinks to work out that will be easier to do remotely now that we have isolated the issues and each have the necessary hardware and system knowledge to debug and fix.

Next steps are to continue making the IR transmission more robust both in consistency and maximum range; ideally, we want to be able to demonstrate it working at the range listed in the transceiver datasheet (up to 10m) which will require more thorough testing. Though we had some small roadbumps as discussed in the team status report, I remain on schedule to have the firmware ready to go for Monday and Wednesday’s interim demo next week.

This week was spent primarily fine-tuning and stress testing the firmware on the arrived boards. Sharon assisted with debugging and ensuring that things were functioning correctly for on the board testing. We also collected some data for testing and validation to be used in the final report and presentation.

Development for the custom receiver is slightly behind schedule. Since I was out of town from Wednesday to Friday, I plan to use this weekend to make up progress to be back on track by next week and the interim demo. Firmware for the transmitter is mostly fine-tuned and ready to be integrated with the model. Our primary goal at this point is to focus on system integration for our upcoming interim demo at the end of the month.

The PCB arrived! In light of this, I spent this week making sure that the firmware could flash on to this PCB as well as performing some preliminary hardware tests. I also started laying down the groundwork to add the custom receiver functionality. Since we have multiple copies of the PCB, we are also ordering an additional ST-link debugger so that Sharon and I can both work on verifying the firmware remotely.

I remain on schedule. For next steps, I will continue to test and develop firmware on the board itself to verify it works as expected on the PCB. Additionally, we are looking to order a IR transmitter so we can further develop the custom receiver modules.

I spent the bulk of the week leading up to spring break working on the design report due on Friday. I was busier than expected during spring break itself, so not much progress happened during that week. I am continuing to verify and test code on the breakout setup to prepare for flashing onto the board. Currently, the biggest concern on my end is making the code as reliable as possible and ensuring that the user control handling is robust.

I remain on schedule. The PCB is probably going to arrive soon, so I will coordinate with Sharon to come up with a test plan since she will also have to verify the PCB initially once it arrives. Until then, I will work more extensively testing on the breakout/breadboard setup to minimize potential issues during PCB testing and system integration.

This week, I got started setting up some physical tests (loopback, basic communication with the peripherals to ensure working) as well as finishing porting over the preliminary code to FreeRTOS. More generally, using an RTOS will make having concurrency between the user-facing tasks (such as status LEDs, mode switching) easier to implement. I also reduced reliance on a debug terminal with serial since the debugger within the Cube IDE provides many graphical interfaces for using gdb. For deliverables, this also involved documenting the overall flow for the design document due on Friday.

I remain on schedule. Next week, we will focus our attention on finishing the design report since it is due this Friday, and I will begin tests to ensure that we retain full functionality when switching to an RTOS based setup. I aim to have this completed by the end of spring break so we can do more integration tests as well as start evaluating the ordered PCB.

Since Sharon finished sourcing all of the hardware, we were able to begin setting up the codebase with some simple code using the HAL libraries with the STM32 Cube IDE. This included ensuring the chosen MCU had sufficient peripherals for all of the functionality we wanted to implement as well as allocating these peripherals. As of now, the codebase builds, but is still somewhat messy as we were trying to get a minimum working example up and running.

On the deliverables side, I began work on the slides for the design presentation to reflect the hardware choices we made.

Next steps include making architectural changes for quality-of-life to make integration easier, as well as ensuring that all of the functions will interface correctly with the hardware for easier integration. Additionally, the team will need to finalize our design slides for the presentation the following week.