This week I managed to finish assembling the PCB together and doing all the necessary physical testing to make sure the PCB works. I also soldered the wires that we will use to the PCB to make it easier to connect everything to the MCU. When testing the PCB all of the voltages and connections were correct. Here are some pictures of the PCB:
In addition to this, I also wrote some code to test the PCB and MCU integrated together and I was able to successfully get the SPI communication working and the MCU was able to receive the x and y data from the optical flow sensor. One last thing I did was write some test Bluetooth code to see if the PCB and MCU could work together to move my computer mouse by communicating through Bluetooth and this test was successfully as well.
I am currently on schedule and the deliverables I hope to complete next week is integrate the force sensitive resistor with the PCB and MCU to make sure the pressure sensing works and do any last firmware clean up to maximize performance of our system. After that all that is left is just testing.
Week Specific Items
Some knowledge I found necessary to learn in order to accomplishes the task of the project was how IMUs and optical flow sensors worked because without this knowledge I would not have been able to effectively write firmware that could use these components. I also needed to learn more about sensor fusion since our project will be receiving data from different components like an IMU, optical flow sensor, and force sensitive resistor so understanding how to fuse all this data together was important for functionality. In addition to this, I needed to remind myself of good PCB habits since our project needed a very small scale custom PCB and there was not much room for error due to the time constraint. The learning strategies I used to obtain this knowledge is watching a lot of youtube videos and reading a ton of documentation and datasheets. I also used AI from time to time to explain concepts that I was unsure about like how optical flow sensors worked or what does connection interval on Bluetooth mean.