This week, I have gotten the servos to work and waiting on getting our new power modules in order to have enough power for all 7 servos to work with incorporation with the app. The motion sensor is now fully implemented with the servos as well as the LED indicator. I also created some rudimentary files with the ESP-NOW protocol as I realized that one Arduino is certainly not enough due to the limitations on the GPIO/Digital pin allocation. Moving forward, there will be two Arduinos with the main arduino programmed with the still-testing/developing Bluetooth module IDE code.
For testing, I put into my code print statements showing when the pill is supposed to be dispensing. This will be first tested individually with the two type of sensors we are using: first, for the motion sensor, it will be tested by having various pills fall in front of the sensor and marking whether or not the serial monitor prints out that it was dispensed. This trial test will take place at least 50 different times so that a percentage of correctness can be calculated. It has already been briefly tested a total of 20 times in one trial run, with 12 out of 20 hitting correctly. Sensitivity will be adjusted, and hopefully with the weight sensor implemented, the overall accuracy can be improved on whether a pill dropped is correctly detected or not.
Progress is behind on the strain gauge end- we’re still waiting on the part arrival but will be working Monday which is when we expect to have them. Otherwise, everything is on track though it would be impertinent to fast forward a bit on the integration as currently we don’t have the mechanical part integrated either.
I hope over carnival I am able to finish the full hardware implementation with all 7 servos, which shouldn’t be too difficult considering how one set of motors is fully working, along with the weight sensing mechanism, which is the bigger challenge but also isn’t as difficult as our final step: integrating the hardware with the software app.
