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!