Anssi Heikkinen


Week 18: Project development

Complete your final project, tracking your progress:
what tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain?
what's working? what's not?
what questions need to be resolved?
what will happen when?
what have you learned?

what tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain?

At this point I have only design of the case ready. So there will be a lot to do in next 10 days. At least I have clear vision what I want to make so I am pretty confident.

Half of the time left at the moment, I am confident that I can present my project next wednesday. Currently milling the board, case is in the 3D printer and have already cut few test versions of the lids already. Nearly there with those.

What's working? what's not?

Most annoying things has been that:

But everything is manageable at the moment. Schedule will be very tight though.

what questions need to be resolved?

There are quite many questions at this point, but I am mostly worried about the program. It looks like the questions about the program will be last ones to be solved. Most of the questions on the week 10 are already answered or will be answered at the beginning of the designing. Question which will be answered last is: Is there any protocol or standard that allows to map keys and functionalities?

what will happen when?

I have rough schedule to get everything done before presentation. There is about 10 days (monday - wednesday) to work with before presentation.

  1. Most important is to design the board. Going to do this first and use all of my attention to do it. If I fail on this, I am not going to make it in time. Planning to be done with this by thursday which means I would have 7 days left to do rest.
  2. When the board is ready, I am going to mill it, 3D print the case and start cutting test versions of the lid. Planning to do these on thursday and friday. 5 days to finish rest of the tasks should be enough unless there is major setbacks.
  3. Since I am using BusinessAsema's lab and we don't have components, I have to go pick them from University, buy some from local supplier and solder them on the board. I will pick up components on friday and will solder them on weekend.
  4. I will evaluate my progress again in a week (3 days to presentation) and will see what kind of action I have to take to be able to present at wednesday. Programming is one major part of the project which is not scheduled other than that it's the last thing I will do. Hopefully I have enough time to make a program to have a working demo by wednesday.

Schedule worked quite well. I was about a day late from original schedule because it took a day longer to finish the board. I worked whole night before the presentation to catch up. I have full access to BusinessAsema lab anytime of the day, so I was able to work there quite many hours at the sunday. Without the access I would have most likely failed to hit the target.

what have you learned?

I learned a lot every day of this final project development sprint. A short snap: how to use ATmega32u4 and to make a board for it, how to get a shape from a picture by using Trace Bitmap on the Inkscape, how to use pushbuttons and potentiometers as buttons, joystick-library in Arduino and so on. For more information, check my final project page.

I have made a list of things to improve in the future. These are things which I noticed while and after assembling the buttonbox. List can be found at the end of the final project page. During the process of making the final project I had to fix only few problems which were mostly related to board. First I milled the board by using a toolpaths which were made by using too big tool diameter in Mods. This was a mistake which I could clearly see after lowering value of the tool diameter and checked paths from both versions.