Interface!

Over break (in between stuffing my face with food), my goal was to design an interactive interface for our system. Unfortunately, I forgot my computer charger and was unable to. BUT I came back and worked on it, initially coming up with a state machine that I would then implement. This iteration of the interface will have a ‘Main Menu’ that has buttons that lead the user to three other menus: Enroll, View History, and View Enrollments. The state machine can be seen in the link below.

Interface State Diagram

The code is not fully implemented yet, but will be by the end of lab period tomorrow (unless we focus more on the fingerprint scanner).

Goals for this coming week: get the Fingerprint Scanner working.

This is the main goal for Joe and I this week.

This week, I focused on creating a TCP client using the TCP/IP stack that Microchip supplies in their MPLAB Harmony package. I have not yet been able to send data from the PIC32 client to a server on my personal laptop, but I’m nearly certain the problem just lies with the code and not how the hardware is connected. Unfortunately, my efforts will be redirected to the Fingerprint Scanner and Interface for the time being. I hope that we resolve the issue with the Fingerprint Scanner so that we could potentially re-implement the TCP client/server.
Over Thanksgiving, I will try to work on a control interface for our system. The interface will display components such as who has recently used the fingerprint scanner and at what time they used it. After break, I will work on the Fingerprint Scanner with Joe. I will initially help decode the C++ library that Joe started using for the Fingerprint Scanner.

This week, my goal was to create a TCP server that could open a socket and listen on a specified port. It needs to be able to accept multiple types of data. The server will distinguish what the data is via op-codes sent by the client. Types of data the server must be able to receive: time of fingerprint, if the authentication was successful or not, and if yes, who’s fingerprint it is.

Status- Server is works fully, all operations work as intended. Mock client can connect to server, send multiple data types (and receive data too, if necessary), control certain functions of server, and disconnect from the server. Server side code implemented in Rust. I don’t believe there would be a problem have the server in Rust and the client in C/C++, but I’ll need to implement a client using Microchip’s PIC32 TCP stack in order to test.

Goals for next week- Implement the TCP client using Microchip’s TCP stack.