This week I made more edits to our housing design to account for the new size of our sensor PCB, and also experimented with code for integrating a pressure sensor into our design.
The idea behind the revised housing design is for our new sensor PCB to have a good field of view near the tip of the pen, while making the tip a lot narrower so that writing feels more natural. This thinned out tip design is possible because our new optical sensor is a lot more compact that our initial one. This thinner tip also allows for our sensor to fully utilize its range of angle in the position it’s on our PCB.
I also worked a bit with code that replaces a button click for drawing with a pressure sensor threshold. As mentioned in our team report, we’re aiming to replace some of our button functionality with a pressure sensor, which will eliminate the need for a user to repeatedly press a button to draw versus move.
As mentioned before, progress is just a bit behind because of the waiting period for our sensor, but now that our PCB is getting in next week, I can expedite with lots of testing and tuning next week.
By next week, I will start integrating actual data from our MCU and sensor, since our physical PCB should be getting in by next week.