Intro

This collects answers to some key questions about my final project. All the documentation about the final project could be found in the final project page.

What tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain?

In the final project page I'm keeping track of the completion of the tasks subdivided in 3 areas: making the case, making the electronics and programming. Each area has a progress bar that indicates the percentage of tasks done and you can find the description of all the problems and the troubleshooting. All the tasks were completed.

what has worked? what hasn't?

My biggest problem was with the case (the body of the duck). It is big and required many hours of print. To reduce the hours I reduced also the quality of the print but then it was not water resistant. So I had to test different settings (as described in the final project page) and I used also epoxic resin. However this is one thing I have to work more studying also the hydrodynamic and maybe I'll add a keel to make it more stable.

The electronics worked fine and also the code. The only problem is that sometimes there is a timeout while downloading data from the web but this is not very significant as the info could be downloaded later.

what questions need to be resolved?

During the development of the project I have to solve different questions.The biggest problem is to make electronics safety work in a wet environment. Indeed the duck is meant to stay in a pool. Problems are related to insulation but also to interferences in the Wi-Fi communication as water can influence radio waves at 2.4 GHz. Another problem is related to power management. Electronics and code should be optimized to harvest energy to allow a longer duration of the battery. The most expensive part in terms of energy consumption is related to wireless communication.

what will happen when?

I decide to keep the project simple in order to realize a first prototype and test and refine my idea. Beginning with too many functionalities could be dangerous for a correct project development. Moreover I learn a lot of things while making the prototype. The most important one was the problem with the water. Even with a good print I didn't had a waterproof case. I used epoxy resin but it partially solved the problem. So one of the future developments will be to find another way to make the case waterproof.

There are a couple of things that I want to develop in the future:

• improve the interaction with the user adding more physical feedbacks
• make a distributed architecture that allows to expand the system adding sensors and actuators (maybe wireless connected)
• add a ph sensor
• add a chlorine dispenser
• add a solar panel for battery recharge

what have you learned?

I've learned a lot about electonics and especially how to make my own boards instead of using pre-fabricated ones. The main advantage is that i can customize my board just to fit my needs. So they do only the things I need and can be smaller and cheaper than the pre fabricated ones. Moreover I learned how to make complex programs in Arduino and to program other microcontrollers. I learned a lot also about 3D modelling, I used different softwares and followed a lot of tutorials and for sure I'll continue studying it. I learned how to use SVN and a better way to manage projects.I learned that I can make almost everything :)

documentation during development

I documented all the steps during the development in the final project page.