Goals:

This week will be more difficult to work on the project due to the holiday weekend and both members will be leaving the state. We hope to have the flow sensor calibrated and able to record the amount of water dispersed before the lab section on November 29. We would also like to have the clock triggering an alarm and begin making connections to the temperature sensor to setup the I2C connections required.

Work Completed:

Adam:

• Soldered temperature sensor breakout board in order to interface with PIC.
• Setup PIC connections, and began working on getting the I2C communication up between the PIC and sensor. Updated schematic.
• Designed preliminary FSM for watering sequence. Wrote the C code, as well as default values used throughout watering process.

Christer:

• Setup voltage regulator to work with the flow sensor. Provides 9 V power to the sensor and scales the output down to 3.3 V.
• Attempted to use Input Capture to read the pulse signal from the flow sensor. Realized that this would not work with the application we are trying to use it for. Are using comparator now to count the number of pulses we receive.
• Updated schematic to include voltage regulator and flow sensor.

Current Challenges:

I2C communication is still not fully understood. Working through example code supplied by Sparkfun to get the sequence of packets used retrieve data from the temperature sensor. Another challenge we are currently working through is the flow sensor, and getting an accurate count of the pulses it outputs. This has been difficult due to the transitions, and the idle state of the flow meter, which is seems to toggle between an output high and low.

Upcoming Goals:

We would like to finalize the FSM we are developing now to determine how we are moving through the watering sequence. The largest contingency on this is how we are determining the optimal watering time based on temperature. We will come to a conclusion on this and Adam will continue to frame the FSM for our final design. Christer will finalize the comparator and be able to record the number of pulses output from the flow sensor that will directly translate to the amount of water being passed through the system. We will both be working on the I2C communication for the temperature sensor as we both will be executing this for the first time.