Christer
i. What I Learned
I learned a lot of useful skills from this project. I became more familiar with C and its applications in embedded systems. The debugging process was important and commenting code as it was written helped a lot with this.
ii. Largest Problem and How I Adapted and Learned
My largest problem during this project came when I was getting the PIC to read the values coming from the flow sensor. I originally tried using the input capture technique used in Lab 5. When this method did not work, I tried using the comparator peripheral inside of the PIC. This did not work either so my final design consisted of an op-amp to generate a clean signal of either 0 or 3.3 V that fed into an input pin on the PIC where the signal triggered an interrupt on rising edges. From this I learned that just because you have used something in the past to solve a similar problem doesn’t mean that it will work in your new application.
iii. How Will This Impact Future Design
In the future, I will think more about what the best way to approach the problem overall instead of thinking how it was similar to things I have done in the past. If it can directly match with a previous design, then it may be useful here, but do not assume it will.
Adam
i. What I Learned
Through this project I gained a better understanding of the iterative design process. At the beginning, we outlined what we wanted to achieve as an end goal, however, arriving at that goal required incremental implementations to ensure that the many sensors we had were working together properly. Sourcing of materials was also a relatively new undertaking. The first temperature sensor I found and received ended up having incorrect pin spacing, and was effectively useless in our application due to its size. These are details I won’t overlook going forward.
ii. Largest Problem and How I Adapted and Learned
While we have used several different communication protocols throughout the semester, I2C was new to me prior to this project. Applying it for the first time was slightly difficult, however, the sensor we used had good documentation which allowed me to get it up and running without too much trouble.
Another problem encountered was the soil moisture sensor, and the inconsistency in its readings. I attempted to calibrate it three times, with it finally remaining semi-fixed. However, after this final calibration our “usable” window was small compared to the sensor’s output range. Moisture readings in actual soil would range from 400-800 roughly, with a total output range of 0-850.
iii. How Will This Impact Future Design
The approach used for this project will be useful going forward, due to the methodical process we engaged in. The project proposal and feedback we received early on allowed us to clearly map out what we wanted to achieve, with consistent updates forcing us to take account of what was (and had to be) done. This held us accountable and kept our design goals on track, so we clearly knew what we needed to implement and how to measure our own success.