In the start of this week, I helped to finalize the slides for the design presentation, especially with refining the technical challenges and mitigations and relating them to the requirements we had defined on the previous slide. When our team met on Wednesday, Tanisha and I spent time discussing using shift registers for our keyboard and lampboard and further defined the peripherals we would need on our schematic. Later in the week, on Thursday and Saturday, I researched how we should power our design, which was something we received feedback on during our proposal presentation. We had decided that the FPGA should be plugged into a wall outlet, but were unsure about what to do for the Arduino. Having to consider power consumption is something that I have not done a lot before, and took a good amount of time researching the basics, which I summarized in the attached document. Ultimately, I decided that we should use rechargeable AAA NiMH batteries with an Adafruit PowerBoost 500 Basic, which is a DC/DC boost converter. While it requires more work to integrate with the Arduino than a 9V battery connected through the power jack, it will last longer. I also considered a rechargable LiPo battery with a similar converter, which would have a greater capacity, but I liked how using AAA batteries is more accessible and is less of a fire hazard that would need to be mitigated for use in a museum or classroom.
My progress is on track since this was an important aspect to decide on as we start designing our PCB schematic. I will continue to work with Tanisha next week on reviewing the exact parts we selected for our PCB and verifying the schematic before I start on the layout. I will also work on summarizing the work we’ve done on the embedded side of the project that we can include in our design presentation.