Progress Report/Engineering Project Journal for Damian Zepeda
Week 15
Date Reported:4/19/24Start Time:2:30 pm
Work Time:1 hour
Demonstrated our project's final PSDRs.
Date Reported:4/18/24
Start Time:5:00 pm
Work Time:2 hours
Assisted my team by starting on an outline of our final project presentation. This included a description of our project's functionality as well as a detailed overview of each subsystem and major component.
Date Reported:4/17/24
Start Time:2:00 pm
Work Time:3 hours
Completed my portion of the A13 report. This involved describing my personal contributions including the design of the audio amplifier, creating the system schematic, translating it to a PCB layout and helping to solder components. Next, I described how I applied any previous knowledge learned in classes such as ECE 20001, ECE 20002, ECE 20007, ECE 20008, ECE 27000, and ECE 36200 and what new skills I learned like soldering and PCB design. Next I described my ethical responsibilities, for which I cited my involvement in describing the possible failure modes of our product as well as mean time to failure (MTTF) of our major components. I took these steps to ensure the device is safe and would not cause harm to users. Finally, I considered the economic, environmental, societal and global impacts of our product. Economically and environmentally I considered the components and materials used to build our device and how cost effective and environmentally friendly they may be. For societal and global impact I considered who might want to use this product and why as well as regions where this game may be popular.
Date Reported:4/16/24
Start Time:4:00 pm
Work Time:2 hours
Coordinated with my group to begin on A13. my contributions included helping to describe the product, its purpose, design constraints, and factors that influenced our design aswell as to identify possible audiences or end users.
Week 14
Date Reported:4/11/24Start Time:6:00 pm
Work Time:2 hours
Helped my group with spray painting our case. I did this by reccommending the type of paint to be used, the finish, layers used, drying time and sandpaper to use for smoothing. It was determined that we would use black glossy quick-dry paint and to let it dry for at least 30 minutes before proceeding with another layer due to wood being porous. I also determined that to ensure the case is painted thoroughly at least two coats of paint should be applied. Finally, to smooth the dried paint I advised my teammates to use a finer sandpaper, preferrably around 400 to 600 grain.
Date Reported:4/9/24
Start Time:9:30 am
Work Time:2 hours
Worked with software lead and team lead to create a software flowchart showing the process of generating new boards for use on our team poster. This consisted of discussing the algorithm used and formalizing a chart showing the logic used to create a sudoku board. First I detailed the process of creating a solved board, randomly generating numbers until the board is full, and retrying if a number entered leads to an invalid board. Next I showed the process of creating the unsolved board for the user. This uses a process of removing random numbers from the board until the desired difficulty level is reached. Each time a number is removed the algorith will attempt to recursively solve the board and will retry the removal of the number until there is only one possible solution to the board.
Week 13
Date Reported:4/5/24Start Time:10:00 pm
Work Time:1 hour
Helped with the layout of our poster, including a brief project description, images of our PCB layout, circuit schematic and system block diagram. I also outlined the main components of our system and went into detail about the function of the audio amplifier circuit.
Date Reported:4/2/24
Start Time:5:00 pm
Work Time:1 hour
Did research to help teammates configure the raspberry pi to run game code on launch. I found a tutorial detailing how to set this up using crontab which can be found here.
Week 12
Date Reported:3/29/24Start Time:4:00 pm
Work Time:3 hours
Worked toward finalizing A10, completing the FMECA worksheet for each subsystem. This included analysis of the voltage regulator circuit, external clock, keypad matrix, GPIO headers, amplifier circuit and circuitry associated with the microcontroller. For each, all possible causes of failure were determined and their effects were considered as well as the level of criticality. This involved close analysis of surrounding circuitry, considering all possible failures such as shorted, opened, or damaged components, signals settling at the wrong values or noise interference. I then assessed the risk level of each of these failures and possible ways of detecting a failure before it occurs.
Date Reported:3/28/24
Start Time:3:30 pm
Work Time:1.5 hours
Continued work on A10, beginning work on part 2.0. I began by breaking our systen into various subsystems for FMECA analysis. I then defined levels of criticality to support this analysis including "Low", detailing incidents that would have little to no effect on the operation of the rest of the system, "Medium", which may compromise the system and even "High", which may cause harm to users. I determined a reasonable failure rate for each case, making sure as threat level rises the accepted failure rate should decrease. I then finalized the citations used in this report, including the military handbook as well as datasheets used for analysis of each component.
Date Reported:3/27/24
Start Time:4:30 pm
Work Time:3 hours
Worked on A10 - Reliability and Safety Analysis, making significant progress on part 1.0. I chose three components for analysis: our microcontroller, voltage regulator and amplifier. I then read through MIL-HDBK-217F to find a suitable model for each component to represent its parameters including die complexity, tempurature coefficient, pin constant, environmental constant, learning factor, and quality factor. The model was used based both on information found in the datasheet for each respective part and assumptions made based on the categories found to be the best fit in the military handbook. I then used equations detailed in the handbook to calculate the amount of failures per 10^6 hours as well as the mean time to failure for each device. It was found that our voltage regulator was most likely to fail but still allowed a reasonable timeframe of operation. I then summarized our results and cited adding a cooling system or purchasing military parts as possible ways to increase reliability of the system.
Week 11
Date Reported:3/21/24Start Time:5:30 pm
Work Time:3 hours
Continued assembling our teams PCB, now mounting components such as our STM32 and associated decoupling capacitors, external clock and decoupling capacitor, GPIO headers, reset button and associated capacitor and resistor and a resistor tying Boot0 to ground. Our next step is to run tests on our microcontroller to verify that it was installed correctly and our circuit does what is intended.
Date Reported:3/19/24
Start Time:5:30 pm
Work Time:3 hours
Continued practicing drag soldering to prepare for using our final board and components. Once I felt ready to begin I started by soldering our power components. This included the raspberry pi header, the LD1117 voltage regulator and capacitors to accompany it. After mounting these components I used a power supply to supply 5 volts and ground to the headers to simulate power delivery from the raspberry pi. I then probed the circuit to verify that the LD1117 was regulating voltage as expected, outputting 3.3 volts.
Date Reported:3/19/24
Start Time:9:30 am
Work Time:2 hours
Practiced various soldering methods including drag soldering and through-hole soldering. I did this by taking boards from previous semesters and soldering various components on. I focused mainly on practicing drag soldering on deffective 128 pin chips.
Week 9
Date Reported:3/7/24Start Time:11:30 am
Work Time:3 hours
Made more changes to PCB design such as bringing out 4 additional GPIO pins to headers for testing. To make these changes first I updated the schematic and exported the new netcode and opened it in the layout editor. Printed layout on paper to verify our components would fit. After discovering that the footprint for our reset button was too large and our mounting holes were too small I went back into the PCB editor to make changes. The button footprint was replaced with a 6x6 mm button and the mounting holes were changed from 2.1 mm to 3.2 mm. The PCB design is theoretically finished and we now await approval before ordering.
Date Reported:3/5/24
Start Time:9:30 am
Work Time:3 hours
Made changes to PCB design according to feedback received during design review. Found new capacitors on digikey.com to represent our 100 uF and 1000 uF capacitors as 0805 does not exist for this size. This involved downloading the included footprint and assigning them to the desired components in Kicad. Due to the footprints being larger it also required components to be moved and retraced. I also moved the audio jack to the edge of the board for ease of accessibility. Another change made was rewiring our external clock from PC14 to PF0. Finally I added a 3.3 volt plane onto the LD1117 for heat dissipation.
Week 8
Date Reported:2/29/24Start Time:9:30 am
Work Time:1 hour
Presented our teams project for midterm design review.
Date Reported:2/28/24
Start Time:12:30 pm
Work Time:2 hour
Worked on powerpoint detailing out main components such as out LM386, screen and battery pack. I mainly consulted the corresponding data sheets and cited important information such as resolution for the screen, operating voltages and expected power delivery and consumption from the battery. I provided both the capacity of the battery pack and expected hourly power consumption of our screen by multiplying the 12 volts supplied by the 3 amps needed making 36 Watts. I placed system block diagram I created and added our schematic images including close ups for detail. I then used tinkercad to create artistic illustration and give a rough estimate of scale. To do this I took measurements of our expected box size, screen size and keypad size and recreated them in tinkercad. The keypad component was an asset found online that proved to be useful for imaging. After creating the 3D model I took a photo of its top view and overlayed an image of the sudoku board we hope to display. I then revisited the PCB design after reworks from Tracy to define new planes. I kept the existing ground plane and added a seperate analog ground plane also on the back layer to isolate the amplifier signals from the rest of the circuit. I also defined a power plane on the front layer covering every component except for the amplifier and designated it as 3.3 volts for our microcontroller. I also updated the schematic to include a 1 ohm resistor from ground to analog ground and added the corresponding footprint and trace to represent the two ground planes as conneted through this resistor.
Date Reported:2/27/24
Start Time:8:00 pm
Work Time:1 hour
Used draw.io to complete the system block diagram for our project. I made this diagram by first considering the need for the STM32 to communicate with the raspberry pi via USART as shown. I also denoted the 8 pins to the keypad matrix as two busses of 4 as inputs and outputs. I next considered that the volume control would be taking the audio signal from the 3.5mm audio jack from the raspberry pi as well as the GPIO pins to signal a change in the digital potentiometer. After the audio control the signal would by amplified and sent to an external speaker. Next I considered power flow. In this case a 12 volt battery will be providing all 12 volts to our LCD touch screen which will provide 5 volts to the raspberry pi. It is worth noting that the connection between the screen and pi also shows HDMI for visuals and USB for touch capabilities. After power flows to the pi, it will provide 5 volts to the components that will need it such as our digital potentiometer and amplifier. It will also provide 5 volts to a 3.3 volt linear regulator. From the regulator, all 3.3 volt components will be powered such as the external clock and microcontroller.
Date Reported:2/27/24
Start Time:5:30 pm
Work Time:2 hours
I added traces on the PCB design for our reset button, headers for connecting our raspberry pi, and GPIO headers. I used a similar process used previously, dragging the footprints of connected components to be close or adjacent and drawing connections according to the rats nest using a 0.3mm wire. The headers were just direct connections and the reset button required a 0.1 uF decoupling capacitor as well as a pull up resistor to 3.3 volts.I then placed a ground plane on the back layer of the board covering all the components routed so far for ease of accessibility to heat relief. Next I began to construct the amplifier. I only got far enough to rought the sleeve of the 3.5 mm audio jack to ground while summing the left and right audio channels with 1 k resistors, and passing this through the digital potentiometer and a capacitor to ground before reaching the input of the LM386N. I did this on the back layer as we would be using a seperate ground plane for this portion of the circuit but this would later be reworked.
Date Reported:2/27/24
Start Time:3:30 pm
Work Time:2 hours
Reviewed presentations for Team 16 and Team 18 for midterm design review.
Date Reported:2/25/24
Start Time:9:00 pm
Work Time:2 hours
Made sure to update schematic so every conncetion is labeled for our netcode to show correct connections. Additionally, worked to replce the existing potentiometer in our amp circuit with a digital potentiomer. Added MCP4011 digital potentiometer connecting terminal A to the sum of left and right audio channels, B terminal grounded and power supply connected to 5 volts and ground. The W or wiper termianl will act as the output of the potentiometer and go to the positive input of the Amplifier. U/D and CS pins were pulled out and connected to gpio programmable pins so the microcontroller is able to control the digital potentiometer. Assigned remaining footprints to each schematic item before generating Netcode. Transitioning to PCB editing, was able to place and add traces for connections between the STM32 and bypass capacitiors, its external clock and the 3.3 volt LDO. I did this by dragging the footprints to the desired location and drawing traces between the connections, watching the rats nest to verify connections are made as designed. The following tutorial aided in getting started with PCB design.
Week 7
Date Reported:2/22/24Start Time:9:30 pm
Work Time:2 hours
Assembled our library of footprints for PCB design. Me and Tracy began by finding the footprints available in Kicad such as our resistors, capacitors and audio jack. For the rest of the footprints that were not found on Kicad, we went looking for the parts we would need on digikey.com. On digikey we found premade footprints for our components such as those for our LD1117, 8 pin female connector, 4 pin female connector, LM386N, STM32F070RBT6TR and MAX7375AXR805. We then assembled all of these footprints into a library which we shared with the team on google drive. Our next steps are to make sure we are able to correctly assign each component to its respective footprint and begin our PCB design. I had intended to get to this stage of design earlier in the week but me and Tracy were preoccupied with studying for an exam.
Date Reported:2/20/24
Start Time:9:30 am
Work Time:2 hours
Finalized prototyping of PCB components in MAN Lab. Changed the layout of our keypad to include 10k pull down resistors for every connection. Once this was done on the schematic, I placed the resistors on the breadboard, connecting all keypad connections to ground using eight 10k resistors. We then used the microcontroller to verify the keypad was functioning as expected. We also worked towards adding GPIO headers to be able to program our microcontroller from our PCB using four pins: DIO, CLK, NRST, and GND. An external clock was also added to fulfill course requirements. It was connected to an arbitrary GPIO pin and uses a 0.1 uF decoupling capacitor. After reviewing the data sheet for our 3.3 volt LD1117, It became apparent we would need a 100 nF capacitor on the input to ground and a 10 uF capacitor on the output to ground. I updated the schematic to reflect this and placed the capacitors on the board and tested that power was flowing as expected. I also changed the schematic to include analog ground for our amplifier as it would be best for audio quality if it was tied to a seperate ground plane. To finalize the schematic we added two LEDs to our GPIO pins for testing and mounting holes. The LEDS were protected by a 1 k resistor for each and both tied to ground. The next course of action is to begin looking at the PCB design.
Week 6
Date Reported:2/16/24Start Time:4:00 pm
Work Time:1 hour
Continued working on schematic, adding more 0.1 uF capacitors to decouple all the power connections from their respective ground pins on the STM32. I also added eight 10k pull up resistors to stabilize the input from the keypad when it is not pressed. These will pull the input up to 3.3 volts when unpressed to ensure it stays on a known state instead of leaving unwanted fluctuations. Finally I added a reset button with a 100k pull up resistor to 3.3 volts and a 0.1 microfarad decoupling capacitor to ground. Our next step to complete the schematic includes adding programmable GPIO headers and an external clock.
Date Reported:2/13/24
Start Time:9:30 am
Work Time:2 hours
After recieving feedback on our shematic it had become clear that we were missing a few components: an external clock, pull up/pull down resistors for the keypad, gpio headers and a decoupling capacitor for the power going to the microcontroller. I quickly remedied one of these concerns by placing a 0.1 uF capacitor parrallel to VDD and ground of the STM32. I also worked with my teammate to update the schematic, adding these changes and removing the Raspberry Pi, speaker, and keypad as they would not be needed in our PCB design. I had also tied Boot 0 to ground. Next we had also made changes necessary to power our devices using one pin from the Raspberry Pi as we had been using both the 3.3 volt pin for the STM32 and the 5 volt pin for the amplifier. We had decided to change this to only using the 5 volt pin. We did this by using an LD1117 3.3 volt voltage regulator. I implemented this device, converting the 5 volts going to the amplifer into 3.3 volts which would then be used to supply power to the STM32. I then assisted my teammate in updating the schematic to reflect changes made in lab.
Date Reported:2/12/24
Start Time:2:30 pm
Work Time:3 hours
Went into lab to unbox the 9 inch display we had ordered. I substituted our Raspberry Pi 3B for a Raspberry Pi 4B while maintaining our connections. I made sure to keep the 3.3 volt pin of the Pi connected to the microcontroller's VDD. I also maintained the connection between the ground pins of the Pi and Microcontroller. Finally I made sure to reconnect the GPIO pins that make up the USART interface, marked TX and RX on the Pi. I then began mounting the Raspberry Pi onto the back of our display with a mounting plate and screws included with the display. I followed the instructions provided to firmly secure the Pi to the back of the screen. I then made connections necessary to interface the screen with the Pi. To do this I powered the display with 12 volts and connected the built in 5 volt out port to the Pi to power it. I then was able to display an image by connecting via hdmi cable. I then connected the touch component via USB C. With the screen fully operational I began to discuss with teammates about possible battery solutions as we had now discovered we would need a 12 volt source as that would power the screen, which would power the Pi, which would power the STM32 and amplifier. We found a potential candidate but decided we should look for more cost effective options. As my Teammate completed the schematic showing the Raspberry Pi interfaced with the STM32 and keypad, I incorporated my amplifier schematic and denoted its connection to the Raspberry Pi audio jack and 5 volt power source. A key discovery made today is that the only power source needed is a single 12 volt battery as the components would then all power eachother.
Week 5
Date Reported:2/8/24Start Time:5:30 pm
Work Time:2 hours
Began work on A7, documenting components we will need to complete out project such as the Raspberry Pi 4, LM386N-3, 8 ohm speaker, 2 1k resistors, 2 100 uF capacitors, 1 1000 uF capacitor and a digital potentiometer for volume control. I did research on websites such as digikey and PiShop.us to determine the best place to source parts and documented manufacturer and provider ID numbers to be able to easily refer to and locate the items for future purchase. Additionally I made further progress on prototyping with the amplifier. Before I had only tested the amplifier with the audio driver on my laptop so I begun loading sounds onto the Raspberry Pi SD card to test if the amplifier would work when interfacing with the Pi. The sounds loaded onto the SD had been previously designed by me using Serum in FL Studio 21. These sounds include indications of winning or losing a game or a time warning that might play when the player is short on game time. To test the playback of these sounds I loaded wav files onto the SD card and connected the amplifier to the Raspberry Pi via male to male 3.5 mm audio jack. I was pleased to discover that noise was even more managable from the Raspberry Pi audio drivers. The current prototype includes a physical potentiometer for volume control but we plan to implement a digital potentiometer in the final product to be able to change the amplitude of the signal via the key pad. I met with team members to discuss possible battery options to optimize battery life and product weight. While the Raspberry Pi draws a significant amount of power we found that many options that may prolong battery life were too large or heavy to be comfortably used portably, or too complex and costly to be wihtin budget. Moving forward it is imperative that we meet with lab coordinators to make a more informed decision on the battery we will use. I also answered some of my teammates questions for A6 regarding 3D printing and which filament would best suited for use in our casing as I have the most experience with 3D printing. We deduced that casing would likely be made of PLA or ABS plastic.
Date Reported:2/6/24
Start Time:11:30 am
Work Time:3 hours
I stayed after lab to begin prototyping our audio amplifier. I first began by reading through the data sheet for the LM386 linked here to determine the operatiional voltage (4 to 12 volts) and pinout. To begin building I shorted ring 1 and 2 on the audio jack as our cable only has one ring and grounded the sleeve. The tip and ring are now linked to the left and right audio channels. I was able to build a starter amplifier circuit by loosely following a video tutorial linked here. As I followed the video I summed the left and right channels, each going through a 1k input resistor, and connected them to the positive input of the LM386 while the negative input is grounded. The power supply pin was connected to a 5 volt power supply with a 100 microfarad capacitor in parallel to ground for instantaneous power transfer for bass notes. The ground pin was grounded and the bypass pin was connected to a 100 microfarad capacitor to ground to help prevent noise from affecting the operation of the amplifier. The output of the amplifier was run through an AC coupling capacitor of 1000 microfarads to remove DC signals before going to the speaker. I then tested this circuit using the audio driver on my laptop only to discover it was very noisy. I used an oscilloscope to find the frequency of the noise at the input of the amplifier to design a lowpass filter that would remove as much noise as possible before entering the amplifier. I also cut a hole in a box and placed the speaker in to seperate the portion that draws air from that which expells air, which I suspect was making noise worse. For my design I selected a capacitor of 0.1 microfarads and a 10k potentiometer to fine tune the filtering and volume. The noise was greatly removed and audio was significantly clearer. I left pins 1 and 8 of the amplifier empty meaning the gain was the default of 20. Next I will begin to test the amplifier with the Rasperry Pi and make changes accordingly.
Date Reported:2/6/24
Start Time:9:30 am
Work Time:2 hours
Spent Lab soldering our audio codec to prepare it for prototyping on the breadboard. The codec initially did not have pins so I made through-hole connections using the soldering station in lab. I did research on possible ways to interface the audio codec with our microcontroller using I2C and SPI connections. I found an example schematic showing a use case in which the microcontroller uses an SD card to send audio to the codec and subsequently a speaker. As I prepared to make these connections for testing, it was discovered through a meeting with coordinators that the codec would no longer be needed and we would instead use the Rasperry Pi for audio. We then decided to start prototyping with a 3.5mm jack and LM386 amplifier.
Week 4
Date Reported:2/2/24Start Time:9 pm
Work Time:1 hour
Looked over teammates work for A5, adding feedback and comments such as power requirements we might want to add and suggestions major components we should discuss.
Date Reported:2/1/24
Start Time:10 pm
Work Time:2 hours
Finalized A4 by researching interfaces we will be using in our design such as I2C, DSI, and HDMI. I described the function of each interface and stated the data transfer rate found through research. I made sure to complete the citation page, converting all my hyperlinks to IEEE format. I then made sure to submit to Brightspace.
Date Reported:1/30/24
Start Time:8 pm
Work Time:2 hours
Continued work on A4, finalized power considerations for section 2.0 by searching the respective datasheets for operating voltage and current draw of components and using these values to calculate power using P = IV. I also wrote a note about the consideration of applying different voltages using the same battery, stating that power converters would be needed. I also noted that an op amp buffer would be needed to avoid loading the speaker. I also took the time to create the system block diagram using the free flow chart software, draw.io. Next I will begin to look at interface considerations for section 3.0.
Date Reported:1/30/24
Start Time:9:30am
Work Time:2 hours
Focused on making progress on the electrical overview, finalizing section 1.0 and working on section 2.0. At this point we have nearly identified all the parts we will be using, allowing me to descibe the components and their functions in the electrical overview. When working on the electrical considerations I was able to describe the operating voltages and frequencies needed by searching datasheets of the Raspberry Pi, STM32 and LCD Screen. The next step is to show considerations for power consumption and begin work on interface considerations. Another pressing concern is selecting a battery that is capable enough to power our devices.
Week 3
Date Reported:1/26/24Start Time:10:00pm
Work Time:1 hour
Designed a few game sounds using Serum in Fl Studio 21 for possible use in the device.
Date Reported:1/26/24
Start Time:1:00pm
Work Time:1 hour
Looked ahead at A4, beginning to draft ideas for Electrical overview, considerations, and interfacing such as battery to be used and power needed to supply the screen. Another concern when it comes to interfacing is how to get the microcontroller to communicate with the Rasperry Pi.
Date Reported:1/23/24
Start Time:1:40pm
Work Time:3 hours
-Man Lab was cancelled due to icy conditions. We decided to have a team meeting to work more on prototyping. A meeting was held with Joe to discuss our requirements for the touchscreen from the research I did and It was discovered we would not be able to drive HDMI with a microcontroller alone. We elected to have a microcontroller communicate with a Raspberry Pi which would drive the screen. This led us to change the the PSDRs for our project. We removed touchscreen input as a requirement for the microcontroller and kept it to only keypad input. The PSDR describing pushing a diplay to the screen was rewritten to communicate with the Raspberry Pi for pushing the display to the screen. We were given a Raspberry Pi 3B, screen, and audio driver. I did research on how to use and interface with the screen using Raspberry Pi. (Tutorial) I experimented with the Raspberry Pi and tested the screen. After booting up the prototype screen I decided we might want to research new larger screens as we have more capabilities now with Raspberry Pi. I drew out the screen size on paper for reference and discussion with team members. (Screen researched 1) (Screen researched 2) I also found resources to be used to develop GUI for the screen in either C or Python.(C resource) (Python resource)
Week 2
Date Reported:1/19/24Start Time:6:00pm
Work Time:2.25 hour
-Had a team meeting, finalized work on A2. I responded to feedback regarding what I wrote and added the night before and expanded when needed. I also wrote feedback on other team member's writings and assisted with rewriting and integration of feedback. We also had deduced that the screen we had found would be a good bet and should wait until we can meet with proffessors in lab before deciding to order it Although we were able to compile a variety of options to ask about.
Date Reported:1/18/24
Start Time:6:30pm
Work Time:1 hour
-Looked over A2, adding feedback for sentences that could be added to our drafts for power and mechanical constraints as much of it was dependant on screen research. Wrote a draft for economic constraints as we had an idea of how much our screen would end up costing. Our next steps are to finalize our theory of operation and lock in the screen we will be using.
Date Reported:1/18/24
Start Time:2:00pm
Work Time:1.5 hours
-Approved edits to PSDRs, fleshed out personal progress report and transferred it from one note to html so it could be hosted locally. Began work on first progress summary. Did research for possible screen to be used. (Tentative Screen Found) Sketched image of how we expect our screen to be implemented.
Date Reported:1/16/24
Start Time:9:30am
Work Time:2.5 hours
-Attended MAN lab 2, thought about possible design constraints for A2 mainly concerning the portability, notably the battery. Focused on researching creating PCB designs in Kicad, from developing schematics, custom symbols, footprints, and associating footprints with their custom symbols. I learned how to then place these components in PCB format. (Tutorials Followed) Met with proffessors about our product description and possible changes that must be made to our PSDRs. It was determined that our prototyping would have to be done with our final screen as not much else would replicate the size of touch display we need.
Week 1
Date Reported:1/12/24Start Time:6:00pm
Work Time:1.5 hours
-Looked over document for proposal as our team had decided to rework our PSDRs. I edited the document while consulting our group chat for feedback and final thoughts before making edits. I then uploaded our finalized PSDRs to our website.
Date Reported:1/10/24
Start Time:6:00pm
Work Time:2 hours
-Had a team meeting in which we finalized the proposal, I mainly edited the work of team workers and made sure everyone was agreement before making the final edits. I also proposed the budget estimations I had made before attending the meeting. I then worked towards finalizing the website, uploading our team description and working with text formatting to have text well indented and spaced.
Date Reported:1/10/24
Start Time:1:00pm
Work Time:2 hours
-Did individual work on the proposal, personally doing research on cost of components such as the screen, keypad, speaker and battery. Looked over the work of other team members, incorporating and providing feedback mainly attempting to finalize a draft of our PSDRs.
Date Reported:1/9/24
Start Time:9:30am
Work Time:2.5 hours
-Worked in lab to get website working, personally working to update my about section including a picture. Worked on A1 regarding member expertise and responsibilities as we discussed our roles. Began work on PSDRs. Received tour and signed waiver as well as took team picture.