Author: bmrodrig

This week has been a pretty busy one, with the board being finally assembled, minus the outside of it. I was not expecting many changes to be made this week, such as getting all-new wood for the pads of the board and getting rid of the usage of polycarbonate due to the quality of the polycarbonate pieces. Another change made was to get rid of a portion of the inner walls of the board and replace them with doorstop pads to softly distribute the weight on the board and support the high weights that we expect on the board. One final change I may try to make tomorrow is to use a stack of three batteries instead of the single battery I am using now to significantly increase the battery life.

With that said, we are currently on track to finish everything and present the project. So next week will be the final touches on the board as well as refining a lot of the firmware to make sure the board functions with high accuracy and double checking with some extra testing. Besides this, the other things I plan to complete/work on are the final paper and preparing for the demo day that is coming up.  Below, I have attached a photo of the current state of the board with my foot as a reference. The final board will look different from this, though, as the outside tape and rubber have not yet been added.

As said in the team report, I tested the strength and detection of steps on the board. Unfortunately, the original design of the pads was faulty in nicely distributing the weight and had strength issues. This is what led to the new and improved pads made of thicker plywood at around 12mm in thickness each. After this, things performed much better, with complete detection of the weights required and the strength to handle heavy weights and sudden strong forces of steps.

The plan for this week was to finish finalizing the board and prepare the final project. Although the board doesn’t have the final polishing layers, testing, and assembly have mostly been completed. In addition to verification of functionality testing, I also had the chance to test out different styles for the pads on the board. I tried various combinations of wood, stainless steel, and polycarbonate and ultimately settled on a layer of wood and a layer of polycarbonate. This added tension and an excellent feel to the board without increasing the thickness too much. I was hoping to get the final board done, but next week, I can dedicate this week to making the board look like a complete product and finishing up any testing and issues I may run into as time passes in the building.

I fell a bit behind overall this week, but that doesn’t change the timeline, as it can’t. The due date doesn’t change, and fortunately, I gave myself a bit of slack this upcoming week in case I ran into some issues like I did this week with assembly, such as the fake acrylic and delayed orders. In the end, this final week is finishing up everything that hasn’t been done and preparing for the final presentation. It’s a good bit of work, but I should be ready to finish on time for demo day. Below are some photos of the new parts being assembled.

Testing different materials. Unfortunately, the acrylic was fake, so we had to work with polycarbonate.

We tried out different wiring configurations. The final design required me to expand the wiring space, as the overlapping wires were difficult to keep from spreading out.

Thanks to the wood bending, the inside of the board was glued together with way more clamps than necessary.

This week, I mainly was finalizing the construction of the board with the parts I was not able to get done last week, and I am beginning to set up the low-power and Bluetooth aspects of the microcontroller. Now that the sensors are set up and functioning, these other parts and integration with the other pieces are now going to be the focus, along with the game aspect being set up with the passcodes. I don’t have any photos this week, as nothing has changed visually from the previous week; it’s just behind-the-scenes stuff.

I am currently scheduled to complete my parts. The focus now is the board’s aesthetics and the wireless connectivity with the application and door lock. I will spend the next week on both of these two parts. However, the main focus will be the wireless connection and low power, as functionality needs to come first for verification and testing.

Verifications:

• Ensure the consistency of the sensors and that they work with every step, and ignore instances of the user standing on the board, NOT stepping. This should work nearly every time without fail.
• Ensure an extended battery life using the low-power system to minimize the time required to charge the device. Ideally, I would like the board to last a bare minimum of a few days of heavy usage.
• Ensure the device is durable from dust, dirt, water, and usage. We will have to throw water and dirt on the device, poorly treat the device by stomping way past the weight limit, etc. This device needs to last and be reliable for everyday use, so we must go a bit extreme in this area.

Validations:

• Ensuring a quick and low-latency Bluetooth connection to the door lock and the app so that there is no difference in time to traditional lock systems and there isn’t a delay causing a malfunction. This needs to work every time without fail or else it can’t beat out a conventional locking system.
• Ensure that the entire system works with a smooth flow that you can verify on the app, use the board, and then unlock the door as desired. This does not have metrics and is more of a test of comfort and ease of usage with multiple users with varying experiences with the device and/or Dance Dance Revolution.

 

This week has been focused primarily on really finalizing the prototype of the dance pad for demo day. After acquiring some of the main things we needed from Home Depot that could not be shipped, the assembly was finished, and a rough version of the final planned board was made. I have decided to go a very affordable route, with many of the materials relying on wood for most parts of it. As it is so thin, it also enables us to wrap this and use it for the final design if necessary. I have attached a photo of a nearly complete version of the board. On the software end and electronics end, most of the time was spent integrating them and making sure the electronics were wired correctly and installed. I have a bit more finalizing to do with the firmware, but by Monday, we will be ready to show what we have made.

(It is not the prettiest, but it should work for now; a lot of the aesthetics will be a plan for the final model)

With all of that said, I am thankfully not behind, and everything has been finished as planned (and is required for the demos). For the next week, the main focus will now be put towards finding ways to make this board a complete and professional-looking product and integrating it with the other parts Jada and Zoe are working on. One focus with them will be on having a secure wireless connection between all of the devices that is low power and does not bleed energy. That shouldn’t be too difficult for this board, but we may have to investigate low-power modes for the Arduino used in the lock.

This week, I made some changes to the prototype design and final design. I worked out the location and setup of all of the electronics in the device and determined the final size of the device and how we could get it. One of the priorities I have had with the device is to make it around as thick as a normal doormat, and with the finalized design of the prototype being under 15mm thick, I believe we have accomplished that.

Although the design of the final board and prototype have been going great, as with the building of it, the firmware end has not been going so well. I have been running into trouble getting the device functional and struggling a bit with the code. All that said, once I get past the speed bump of its functionality, coding the game part won’t be much of an issue.

That being said, next week is when I plan to finish the board prototype itself and finalize the code so that everything is ready for demo day. There is no room for delay, though, as the demo is coming up very soon.

A large portion of the previous week was spent working on the design report, getting feedback, and improving upon the suggestions from the design presentation. Within the report, I focused a lot on refining and writing the Architecture and Principle of Operation and the System Implementation of the dance mat itself. Currently, I am still working on the design of the interior of the mat and keeping it thin, especially now that we are moving the speaker from it. Once that is done, I should have some detailed images to show that interior. The electronics themselves work fine, so integrating them and finishing the mat will be the focus.

I am behind on the design part as well as the assembly. But if everything works as planned right now, everything should be ready for demo day to test. Finally, the plans for this week are to quickly finish up the design and actually begin putting things together for testing and demo by demo day.

My primary goal was to begin testing the sensors we selected, finalize the presentation, and prepare to present. I successfully completed testing, verified the devices we had were functional, and got comfortable with how they worked. With that testing, we found the solenoid for the lock was able to function at 5V, saving some trouble with dealing with the advertised higher voltage, which I was initially worried may be a bit high for a low-powered lock (this image is attached).

Additionally, I began the process of designing the CAD for the doormat. I’ve attached a render of it to this update. The plan is to have the front part act as a traditional doormat to wipe off shows while the other part is the dance pad. The front part is also currently planned to store the battery to allow easy battery swaps.  I also planned out the wiring for the project to move towards developing the PCB from the work I completed on the presentation with hardware diagrams.

So far, the progress for the project is mostly on schedule. I was not able to do thorough testing of each device, but verifying the functionality should be sufficient moving into the following week. I am a week behind the official schedule on finishing the CAD, but that should be completed early this coming week. To remain on schedule next week, I also plan on putting together all of the electronics for the project and verifying they will fit within the CAD before we proceed with creating the case.

This week was spent researching the possible ways to integrate all of the technology and assembling a parts list for ordering. After much research, I was able to compile some options that ranged in complexity to build for the dance pad microcontroller and sensors. The current path we agreed upon sticking with for now is to use the same microcontroller for both the pad and lock and have a custom PCB using set-up components. After researching the possibility of designing a development board from scratch using an SoC, I realized finding a middle ground between that and a built-up board was the way to go. I’ve spent time from here drawing up some rough sketches for the charts that Jada and I can finalize with proper Visio maps for the presentation on Monday. There, the more finalized plans will make sense and be visualized appropriately.

The schedule is mostly on track as we are ordering parts through Amazon, so they should arrive by tomorrow. We didn’t order everything as we are still trying to finalize the board’s audio output, but that shouldn’t be much of an issue as we will be busy testing the other parts this week. Overall, we should continue on schedule as planned. This week, I hope to get the sensors working and verify their functionality, and from there, we can begin building in the coming weeks. More pictures of actual progress should accompany the following updates once parts arrive and work begins.