Week 6

Welcome back. As everyone in our group had midterms to study for this week, progress was minimal.

PCB Design:

We managed to get one of our PCBs populated with components.

We are able to supply power to the appropriate pins, however the programmer to upload the PSoC firmware is not syncing. The software used to program the chip is detecting the chip and also sensing that it is powered, however any attempt to flash the board fails. This is quite discouraging, and we will be spending next week trying to debug this issue. We also made a second board and had the same problems. For troubleshooting purposes, we purchased a development board made by Cypress so that we can try to program that chip instead. If that doesn't work, it may mean that it is not our board and the issue lies in configurating the software properly. That board should be arriving within a week so hopefully in the next two weeks to come we can tackle this issue, however if the problem is the board design, we most likely will not have a custom PCB by the time the quarter is over.

Firmware:

Firmware still stands as it was. It is completed for the most part, and small adjustments may be made once we finish the phone app.

Software:

The phone app is still being developed. We are still trying to get all of the BLE features to show up on the phone and hope to have some progress to show by the end of next week.

Mechanical Design:

Next week will we begin assembling an aquaponics system to demo our project on, as well as completing a design for a PCB enclosure.

Next week:

As briefly stated above, next week will be spent debugging our main PCB, as well as finishing the aquaponics system and PCB enclosure. Progress will also be made on the phone app. Additionally, the relay PCB may be arriving as well, which means we can also populate that board and begin testing. Stay tuned!