Weekly update for 9/22
This week has been quite busy with career fair and everything, hopefully next week is not as busy. Our team was able to meet with Shane and talk about the possibility of publishing a paper. Shane had us watch a video to prepare us for the meeting and he broke down how the paper is written and gave us some pretty good resources to help us write it. Anders started a shared Word for us to write it up and we started to make slow and steady progress. We were able to get some data that we would need from Jenna and started getting some of the “preliminaries” out of the way before getting into the real meat and potatoes of the paper. We were thankfully able to find a spare Pi in the lab, a 2014 model, to prototype in the meantime while we write the paper. It may not be the strongest model but should help us to get something that works more consistently and with clear sounds. I plan on looking at some power electronics to connect it straight to the grid from poles to, that should be fun.
Weekly update for 10/2
Another good week has gone by. Writing the paper has been quite interesting, I’ve just been writing down words and it has been a struggle to actually get myself to start it. Not sure exactly what words to put down but I guess starting is always the hardest part. Just hodge podge of words that hopefully are effective in communicating for a scientific paper. The hardest part is I am not sure if I should right about the Arduinos we used originally or the pis that we have been working on now and want to use. Everything is still being prototyped and improved while writing and it makes it difficult. Speaking of pis, we are moving away from the arduions and found a pi, specifically the SC0073 that can be found on digikey. Has an amazing price point! Granted quite weak but it’s exactly what we need and has all the features, such as ethernet, an sd port, and gpio pins with enough ram. Also, the hole that has the wires dangling out and separate the inside and the outside of the box with nothing but a layer of not very trust worthy silicon does not sit right with me. So we have decided to opt for the DTP 2 pin connectors, one for power and one for audio and pictured below. They have a high price point but they’re worth it, once everything is crimped and put together they are very easy connectors to use and they are water, dust and most other kinds of proofs that we need. They can handle decent current rating also. The only trade off is that we require a proper crimper for these connections but I have one and the barrel kind are quite nice.
10/28
October is almost over, and everything seems to still be on the timeline! We hope to have the physically done tomorrow. It is already more compact and sounds much better then what it was before! We hope to finish installing everything in the box. A piece is 3d printed for the LCD and the keypad to nicely fit in the box as well. Coding has gone quite nice as well, files are being read and being played through the speakers. A problem we are currently stuck on regarding file management is what is a good way to download and store files onto an sd card. But since the system has an OS and internet access to could be just set up to that the files are downloaded straight through the PI. Coding at this point is just now recoding what we had in the last rendition. Excited for the future and its gonna be looking good!
11/4
Not much to report on this week! Progress is steady and prints are coming out quite nice. We need to order some pg connecters for clean connections but the inside of the box is looking very nice! A little behind schedule as I wanted to the box to be completely done by now and focusing on the paper. I think its fine. We still have two months to work on the paper as well as the fact that I want the box to look as nice as possible.