Team E7: The Wand Makers

Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone, Spring 2025 — Sharon Lai, Olina Zhang, Nadia Palar

Category: Nadia’s Status Reports

Nadia’s Status Report for 3/8/2025
Posted by : npalar Nadia's Status Reports

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.

Nadia’s Status Report for 2/22/2025
Posted by : npalar Nadia's Status Reports

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.

Nadia’s Status Report for 2/15/2025
Posted by : npalar Nadia's Status Reports

Initial iterations of the device drivers for the IR receiver and external flash memory have been finished. The codebase is less messy, but there are some restructuring changes that will be finished. Since Sharon has began testing some of the initial firmware, I started a new branch to begin integrating FreeRTOS for task management; this will ideally help with some of the contention and aid with overall robustness and handling. This involves additional restructuring of the code so that various blocks can be more cleanly organized into tasks.

For deliverables, I created more polished versions of our block diagrams for the design presentation this week and started work on the design report document.

I remain on schedule. Next week, I will work with Sharon to complete the first hardware order of the semester so we can get the PCB fabricated as well as begin more thorough development testing for our drivers and overall use-case flow.

Nadia’s Status Report for 2/8/2025
Posted by : npalar Nadia's Status Reports

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.