Week 7

This week was pretty exciting because we are finally getting everything integrated. The project is finally taking shape!

Hardware:

Bad news first. The Cypress Dev board that uses the same BLE chip we are using arrived this week and we were able to make some conclusions about our own PCB design. We were able to load our program onto the dev board, which means that the problem lies within our PCB design and not the chip programmer settings. This is unfortunate and means that will we will have to resort to the dev board to present our project. There are about 2-3 other groups using a similar chip for their project, and so far no one has been able to program the chip on their own board. A plus side is that we can use this smaller dev board instead of the PSoC 4200 dev board, which is quite a bit larger.

On a better note, the relay PCB board was assembled and tested today, and it works! It was pretty satisfying putting the board into our 3d printed relay box and hooking it up to our PSoC and turning the relay on and off with our phone.

Relay:

Software:

Another big step forward was made with the phone app development. We were able to connect to one of the characteristics of the BLE service, in this case toggling the GPIO on/off. So not only were we able to control the relay switch, but we were able to control it with our own iOS app! This also means that reading the sensor data over BLE should be as simple as adjusting the code for the relay toggle accordingly.

Firmware:

Firmware has not changed, as it is mostly done. Once we are reading data over BLE to the iOS app, we will write code in the app to do our conversions for us.

Mechanical Design:

This week we also started building our aquaponics system so that we can (hopefully soon) integrate all of our sensors and relay switches with it's intended application.

Aquaponics System:

Don't mind my cat perusing. This is a rough build, as plumbing will still need to be finished and the light fixture adjusted.

Next Week:

By next week we plan to have the aquaponics system completed, as well as a PCB enclosure for the dev board. The phone app will mostly not see progress until the week after, as our member in charge of the app development has midterms this week. We have 3 weeks left to work on this project, and in two weeks we hope to have everything fully integrated, with just finishing touches on the phone app left to work on. Stay tuned!