19. Project development

This week’s assignment was to track the progress achieved for completing the final project, so I make the exercise to answer the following questions in order to organize ideas and prepare the plan for the upcoming weeks.

What tasks have been complete?

  • The case of the camera has been designed and printed.
  • The code for the working of each sensor has been studied and tested alone in Attiny microcontrollers and in the ESP32.
  • It has been prepared a PCB to attach the ESP32CAM board and the other sensors to develop the essays and testings to be sure that it works whole together.

What tasks remain?

  • There must include a microcontroller in a PCB of the project to make things out of the commercial board (Openclass recommendation).
  • Work on the PCB and the code which includes a microcontroller with other peripherals for the device.

What’s working?

  • Triggering mechanism using the PIR sensor.
  • Save the captured photo in an sd memory.
  • Generate a file with the environmental data from the DHT11 sensor.

What’s not?

The board gets out from the Deep Sleep mode with the triggering mechanism one time and saves a photo and a text file but the files appear as damaged. The ESP32 cam is not working with the two sensors connected and the SD file saving data. There are not enough available pins. The SD is corrupting each time that the program runs.

What questions need to be resolved?

How to make all the peripherals work without collapsing the microcontroller and the memory storage.

What will happen when?

In the upcoming weeks, I am going to: Write the code using interrupts in mycropython to make a less heavy and complex program. Design and fabricate a PCB with another microcontroller which things apart from the ESP32 the data storage of one of the sensors.

What you have learned?

The importance of documenting the progress of fabrication projects to complete the steps planned. How the internet of things devices work. The importance of power consumption managing devices that work with different kinds of RF communication. How to generate 3D models from EDA software to design 3D printed cases around them.