Personal Accomplishments
- Lab meetings (6h): During our schedule lab meeting hours, we did our interm demo and recieved great feedback. I also continued work on the hardware solution, which is described below.
- Second glove implementation (4hr): Worked on creating a second glove. This consisted of copying the first glove in implementation, but instead using our new Olimex ESP32 with an on-board power jack so we can test a battery-powered implementation. I spent a deal of time soldering up 4 more sensors with wiring such that they can be attached to the second glove. The battery powered ESP works!
- Built pull-up bar for final demo (1hr): I spent time building the pull-up bar we ordered for our final demo.
- Sensor tuning (3hr): I spent time deciding what gain/voltage range we wanted to use for our sensor amplifier, after testing whether a 0.5-3.3 vs. 0.25-3.3 vs 0.15-3.3 voltage range, using a gain of (837k/[3M->100k]), I found that the larger forces were better measured, since the the gain was more linear, using the 0.15-3.3 range.
- Device Verification & Validation (5hr): I spent time working with Alex to run verification & validation test at the Iron City Bouldering gym where we performed durability, safety, ergonomic, and BT speed tests using the open climbing environment with various climbing levels and hangbars for more static weight tests.
- Final Presentation prepare (8hr): I spent time working on the final presentation, specifically updating the solution body diagram, the hardware solution, the testing requirements, the hardware/software test results, and design tradeoffs.
Progress
- Continuing work on verification and validation tests
- Everything is on track! Working on stretch goals (PCB, CAD, Second Glove, etc.)
Next Week tasks & goals
- Working on PCB and CAD for device capsule
Guidance
I learned how to find an appropriate microcontroller for a given application and how to use a new one: ESP-32. Previously I had worked with an STM32 and Teensy 4.1, but those were in projects where the MCU was chosen for me. So for this project, I had to do some research into viable MCU’s, where I learned how to perform proper tradeoff analyses for deciding which hardware to use for my application. I spent a great deal of time deciding which factors I should use to determine viability, and in doing so, found myself learning how to scan through reviews and documentation to perform comparisons of each device. The same occured in my process for finding which sensors we should use for our CLIMB device. I even had to call sensor distributors to acquire more information about the sensors I was considering for my application. This process forced and taught me to become more comfortable in information gathering and tradeoff analyses for the application design process. In regard to learning how to work with the ESP-32, I learned how to work with the Expressif toolchain to flash and debug my CLIMB code. I also worked with the Arduino libraries to utilize the on-board ADCs and PWM modules, which required me to look into the MCU’s peripheral functionalities, and decide which ports I would use for the various tasks my application required.