10. Application and Implication

This week was dedicated to researching our final project further and also catching up with our documentation. Detailed documentation on the project can be found on the final project page. We were given some questions to answer regarding our final project.

Q and A

Here are the questions that we were required to answer.

What will it do?

A locking mechanism for bags that will open with a keypad or finger sensor. Additionally, I hope to add a bluetooth chip to connect to an app to set the passcode. Another spiral is to add a GPS unit to track the bag. Here is a sketch from week 1:

Who’s done what beforehand?

There have been a couple of locking mechanisms done before for final projects. I listed a few below.

What will you design?

  • Design a laser cut bag as the outside shell on Fusion360
  • Design a 3D printed box for the electronics on Fusion360
  • Design 3D printed strap for the bag on Fusion360
  • Design a PCB for the electronics on EAGLE

What materials and components will be used?

  • Wood for the laser-cutting the shell
  • Filament for 3D printing
  • Materials for cutting out my PCB
  • Keypad/ Fingerprint sensor
  • Servo motor with the latch attached
  • Bluetooth module ?

Where will it come from?

Most of the parts are available in the Fablab inventory. The fingerprint sensor and the servo motor will be ordered from Digikey.

How much will they cost?

The fingerprint sensor is around $45-$60. The servo motor is around $10.

What parts and systems will be made?

I plan on buying the electronic components like the fingerprint sensor, servo motor and the microcontroller. Everything else will be made in the lab.

What processes will be used?

  • Laser-cutting
  • 3D-printing
  • PCB production

What questions need to be answered?

  • Use the keypad or the fingerprint sensor?
  • Need to figure out the code
  • How to power it?
  • How will the electronics be placed inside the bag?
  • PCB still needs to be designed on EAGLE

How will it be evaluated?

My project should be successful if it can incorporate 2D and 3D design, additive and subtractive fabrication processes, electronics design and production, embedded microcontroller interfacing and programming, system integration and packaging. The design and production of the bag should cover the 2D and 3D design aspect. 3D printing of the strap and the casing for the electronics should cover the additive fabrication process. Design and production of the PCB will cover the electronics. In this project, the input will be the passcode and the output will the motor turning to unlock the bag.

Issues

I ran into an issue wih pushing my work onto my site from Visual Studio Code. I kept getting emails that my pipeline had failed. This was probably because of a version update.

I logged into gitlab to see if anything could be done directly. There was a pop-up citing an issue similar to what I had. Two changes had to be made to get it to work.

1) Changed the requirements.txt to use the previous version. Replace the text with 

mkdocs
mkdocs-material<5.0

2) Change the first line of the file .gitlab-ci.yml from 

image: python:alpine

to

image: python:3.8-slim

This took care of the problem and I was able to push my work.

Assessment Guide

Answer the given questions