Author: mbgroom

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 7

This week in our meeting, the different teams presented their progress.  The hardware team and software teams have started to work fairly independent of each other since we have agreed on our basic design.

From the software team, we have a working code for the keypad matrix that takes in an array of 4 digits as a pin number.  There is discussion about whether pin numbers should be 4 digits or the length should be left up to the user.  The only problem we ran into getting the keypad matrix up and running was a faulty pin in the header for the keypad.  After switching a few pins around, everything is working great! The software team also set up a basic format for the data that will be stored in our MySQL server.  Each user ID will have a boolean variable for each of the machines and one variable for the type of user (administrative or otherwise).

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This is a photo of Brice and Giandre working on the code for the keypad matrix!

        From the hardware team, there wasn’t much work done on the actual CATS alpha.  Instead, the hardware team worked on and submitted an abstract for ISAM (International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces) which got accepted.  This week, the RaspberryPi was also set up and the circuit was constructed.

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This is Maurice trying to help Stefan understand how the MySQL server will function.

        For next week’s meeting the software team will work on turning a lamp on and off using the CATS system and the hardware team will design a PCB to streamline the production of the CATS system.  The hardware team will also work on getting an initial design for the housing.