Week 5 of 2017

This weeks blog will feature a dual post from Stefan and Brad:

It has been a busy last week for all the students on the team as we have seen a wave of tests sweep campus for all majors. To catch everybody back up with what has happened with the team I’ve included a short synopsis below:

There was some weird things happening to the team after they were terrorized by a monster named Grendel the day or so after Brice had posted his blog update. Owen managed to rip off Grendel’s arm and then defeats Grendel’s mother with some cool armor he had 3D Printed.

Owen became king of the CI Members, and found his project terrorized by an Exploding Capacitor, some of his progress had been stolen from his box containing the CATS project. He attacks the Exploding Capacitor with the help of his hardware team, but they do not succeed. Owen decides to follow the Exploding Capacitor to its lair at The Watt Family Innovation Center, but only his young Swedish relative Wiglaf, whose name means “remnant of valor”, dares to join him. Owen finally slays the Exploding Capacitor with the help of the hardware team, and Wiglaf, but is mortally wounded in the struggle. He is cremated and a burial mound by the sea is erected in his honor.

The hardware team finished their work with the PiHat and with the Enclosure for the system. These are currently on order and will be received and printed by next week’s blog post. Brad made a pretty sweet website.

-Stefan

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“The Exploding Capacitor: An Old English Epic Poem”

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Owen, seen smiling next to the defeated Exploding Capacitor

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Software team, debating ‘if’ statements

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Young Morris learns to solder

Oh.. and the website stuff

1

Home Page

Login

Login

LoginConfirm

Login

machinecontrolpanel

Machine Control Panel

AddMachine

Add Machine Form

UsersControlPanel

User Control Panel

AddUser

Add User Form

logoutconfirm

Logout Confirmation

Unfinished Features:

  • Events Table
  • Export Events, User, and Machine tables to Excel
  • Visual Graphs on Events, User, and Machine metrics
  • Machine State Toggle Functionality
  • Authorization Controls

Sources:

Lore – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#Third_battle:_The_Dragon

Bootstrap/HTML/CSS Coding – https://www.w3schools.com/

Data Tables – https://datatables.net/examples/server_side/select_rows.html

Data Tables With in Table Controls- https://editor.datatables.net/examples/simple/inTableControls.html

Debugging/Error Handling – http://www.tutorialrepublic.com/php-tutorial/php-error-handling.php

Forms – http://bootsnipp.com/forms

 

Icons – http://fontawesome.io/

Password Hashing – http://php.net/manual/en/function.password-hash.php

Toggle Switch – http://www.bootstraptoggle.com/

-Brad

 

 

Week 4 of 2017

Although this week wasn’t busy for the CATS team, some big stuff happened.  The hardware team’s work began to come together this week.

Thanks to Thor’s hard work, the brand new PCB design was finalized!  We will order the new PCBs as soon as a new Mr. Bill of Materials is completed so that we can also order the new components we’ve picked out.  In addition, the funding for our project was finally approved.  This means that we can finally order a new RFID scanner for Maurice to play around with implementing.  The new housing design was completed ahead of schedule by Stefan and Josh.  We made an attempt to 3D print the housing but unfortunately our print failed after only a few hours.

The hardware team should be pretty busy over the next few weeks.  Once the new PCBs arrive we will have to learn how to solder surface mount components and someone will be tasked with programming the EEPROM we implemented in order for our PCB to be called a PiHat.  If we can order the new RFID scanner we want, Maurice will be busy for the next week or two getting the driver software in order to make it work.  We will also be printing housings and laser cutting face-plates for our newest prototype.

Week 3 of 2017

Hello interwebs!

My name is Thor, and I am a new member of the CATS Creative Inquiry squad. I am majoring in Computer Engineering, and am part of the Hardware team for the CI. I met Owen last year, and he wouldn’t stop bugging me about joining his CI so I decided that it would be a great way to gain experience with circuits, which is a huge passion of mine. It’s been an honor meeting the rest of the team and I’ve enjoyed being a part of it for this short amount of time.

These past few weeks have mostly been a learning and research experience. I’ve had to learn how everything connects and what all the components on the Raspberry Pi and our PiHat do, so I have a better understanding of where the traces on our PCB should go. Another big thing I have had to learn is how to work KiCad. Working on it makes me realize that I am actually contributing to how the design will turn out, and that’s been an awesome feeling.

So far, I have helped with redesigning the footprints on the PiHat board. We are also changing the LED on the board to a Neopixel to add nicer color effects. I was in charge of researching this and a diode that could be used to supply the correct amount of voltage to power the Neopixel.

The Hardware team hasn’t had too much on its plate since the beginning of the semester, but Software team has definitely been busy. They are a good group of guys who have been working hard on this project. I can’t explain what they have been doing very well, but I know they are still working on getting the other card scanner to work with our cards, the requirements.txt file, and the audio features.

I got a chance to see the admin panel being worked on, and it is looking good right now. We are able to add admins to the database now, so that seems to be going very well.

I believe that covers most of what has been going on (and what I actually understand as of right now). I think this semester will be a challenge but it will definitely be worth it working on this team.

Until next time!