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During weeks 6-8, we focused more on the physical design of the modules and worked on making some CAD drawings and 3d printing a few prototypes. We didn't accomplish much on the raspberry pi coding front due to some technical difficulties we experienced with our Micro-SD cards. Both of our Micro-SD cards ended up getting corrupted, leading to us ordering a new one that will arrive in the next week so that we can retry installing an OS onto the Pi, which would allow us to start integrating some of the communication between the Pi and the modules.
One of the first things we did was review the feedback that we received on our project idea and progress from an industry professional. Mr. Bill Soley gave us some really detailed and helpful feedback on everything, including background parts of our process like the website.
We became aware of general safety issues, such as the potential water contact with electronics. In the near future we are putting more emphasis on the mechanical design of the two modules that we are planning. There are also some problems that we will probably not deal with until later, such as security considerations for the app.
Mr. Soley also suggested a couple of great feature considerations that we had similarly brainstormed, like having an open interface (customizable) module and home automation features (for example, making coffee when you wake up).
In our previous brainstorming sessions, we had chosen to start our project with a pet caller/scent maker module. To start constructing this module, we did extensive research on ways to diffuse a smell throughout a room that could be connected to a Pi through bluetooth or wifi so that we could control it from afar. We settled on buying a diffuser off amazon, but none of the options we found had built in capabilities that would make it easy to be controlled from a raspberry Pi. We ended up buying a small smell diffuser that came with its own battery and fan because of its simple design and because we believed that it would be possible to directly connect to it through its circuitry to control it.
This turned out to be slightly harder than we first envisioned because we couldn't find any circuit maps for the diffuser we were using, so we needed to use a multimeter to conduct various tests on the circuit that would allow us to understand its structure better and connect up to it using our own cables.
We ended this week with coming up with a plan of action on how to connect up to the diffuser circuit and will work on fully implementing this functionality in the following weeks.
After buying the diffuser, we began to work on the module that it would be implemented into. We used a basic CAD program in order to 3D print a rectangular prism shaped case. While the diffuser came in its own wood colored case, we decided to disassemble it (as according to this guide) and take the electronics for our own case, which would better fit our vision for the product. The first case that was printed was too small, and the cover did not fit the main body of the case. So we ended up printing a second version that was a little bit larger and better fitted.
During this week, we also started making some of the games that the alarm clock app will use, we started with a mario-kart style racing game through unity that can be made compatible with android devices so that we can insert it into our app in android studio.
Inspiration for some modules we could add that control things in your house to wake you up.
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