Week Goals

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: Allow the ESP to communicate without stalling. Improve UI and start integration testing with Ian.

Worked on this week

Waseh:Fixed Bugs within the light controller module to prevent it from having a race condition. Improved the UI to provide easier ability to debug software as well.Worked with ian in debugging and testing entire system.

Ian: Designed and built enclosure and PCB for controller.  Integrated shade control and network code with Waseh.  Much system debugging, mostly with Waseh.

Challenges

The PCB was something of a nightmare.  It was designed somewhat too hastily, and required many manual modifications and jumper wire to work.  There were a number of poor solder joints that took a while to find and fix.  Large amounts of time were spent debugging mysterious motors that wouldn’t stop that ended up being due to some sort of power supply problem.

The Light controller stalls sometimes and requires another command from the motor controller to get out of that state. The esp also requires a bit of calibration before starting up.

Goals for next week

Together: Finalize report/presentation/documentation and demonstrate functionality

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.

Week Goals

Waseh: Goal for this week was to understand the working of the ESP8266 and be able to communicate with the other ESP8266. We had also planned on developing the software for communicating via the PIC.

Ian: Finish mechanical design and fabrication (motor mounts, etc.).  Prototype circuit on breadboard for the shade controller.

Worked on this week

Waseh: Communicating with the ESP8266 via usb_serial interface. Developed understanding of the networking requirements. Setting up communication with the PIC and allowing the PIC to automatically program the ESP8266 and communicate using that with the webpage.

Ian: Modeled shade controller in Inventor.  Laser-cut and assembled parts.  Wired a Hall Effect sensor (soldered leads as well as a decoupling capacitor across the power supply to the sensor itself).  Tested motor drive system by using the signal generator to create the PWM signal for the servo.  Added multipole ring magnets to the drive pulley and tested hall effect sensor using the oscilloscope.  Tests generally went well, though there were some surprises (see challenges section).  Most notably, the motor seems to be able to generate sufficient torque to drive the shade without pulley slippage.

Challenges

The Hall Effect sensor seems to work slightly differently than expected.  Firstly, it is less sensitive than would be ideal, and needs to be closer to the magnet than our design currently places it.  This is not too difficult, but does require some hardware modifications.  Secondly, it’s definition of “high” seems to be ~0.7V.  It is unclear at the moment whether this is due to incorrect wiring or because it is simply how the part works.  Regardless, either the associated electronics need to be fixed, or additional processing hardware is needed (in this case, probably an op-amp) to be able to feed this signal into the PIC.

Understanding the working of the ESP took longer than expected and so did the library implementation. This helped us understand the system better though so it will come in handy.

Goals for next week

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).

Waseh: Development of the software for interfacing with the light sensor and communicate control signals to the other ESP8266 using the PIC. Also to develop ability for motor-control ESP to read and reply to the main controller.