Week Goals

Waseh: Goal for this week was to establish communication with the other ESP and be able to virtually control the brightness level setting. The other goals was to set up the LCD touch and display and interface with the ambient light sensor.

Ian: Fix Hall Effect sensor and/or design appropriate conditioning electronics.  Move control from the signal generator to the PIC itself.  Implement simple shade open/close commands via buttons on the shade controller (including speed feedback control and endpoint detection).

Worked on this week

Waseh: Controlling the brightness setting on the LCD display via the web. Communicating to other ESP when to adjust the brightness levels. Setting up the touchscreen display.

Ian: Built second shade control module (other degree of freedom).  Assembled Hall Effect sensors and attached to motor modules (they had been previously wired incorrectly).  Wrote software for endpoint calibration/detection and moving to a target location.  Tested on actual blinds in AEC 429.

Challenges

Parsing the ESP UART data proved to be more difficult especially with acknowledge signals needing to be checked for. There are also timing issues when the program tries to read too many times from the UART instead of staying idle until the data is ready to be received (Can fix this using protothread library). The connections also have to be established in order i.e. first with the shade controller ESP and then any with the web interface as the web connections need to be closed immediately afterwards. Having some trouble in closing them/opening them immediately.

Mechanical systems are annoying.  Slippage with the actual shades is a significant problem.  Somewhat mitigated by using rubber bands to increase friction on the pulleys.  Wrapping the string multiple times on the pulleys also seemed to help.  There was some delay in Hall Effect integration due to FedEx losing the DigiKey order.  Some work was needed to allow for two servos and two Hall Effect sensors to all connect to the same PIC due to a general lack of timers that can be used with the IC and OC modules.  This was solved by using the PPS as a mux to select the current motor, though this solution imposes the constraint that only one degree of freedom can be moving at a time.

Goals for next week

Ian: Work with Waseh on integrating the shade control system with the ESP network.  Add physical buttons on the shade for manual control.  Make a PCB, or at least organize the breadboard somewhat more.

Waseh: Implement the shade controller part of the ESP module and integrate with the motor control section. Also, have to be able to make sure the signals protocol is robust. Also need to add buttons for fixed control of the shade apart from just brightness control.