During week 11 and Christmas break, we focused on designing circuits for each subsystem, set out a list of hardware to buy and created a sketch for the GUI. We split up the tasks so that one member would design the circuits, using the Fritzing software to simulate hardware, one member would try to produce demo code for one subsystem and look into how the subsystems can combine into one, and the third member would sketch and prototype the GUI.
Circuit Design
On circuit design part, we first separated the system into several subsystems. As some needs external 12v power supply and other only needs raspberry pi on-board supply. One example subsystem is temperature control subsystem, it include DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, a radiator(heater), a PWM controlled fan.
As we can see from the diagram, the sensor would give real time temperature and humidity data reply to board. The Fan is controlled by PWM which signal is output by the board and powered by the external power supply. The radiator is fully controlled by output voltage of a ping on board. Other systems are similar in design they are parallel connected to power and ground if needed.
Code Demo
We connected one sensor to the raspberry pi and collected data with this simple code below:
By familiarising ourselves with how to use the raspberry pi on real life data gives us an insight to how we can design our code later.
GUI Prototype
We began to prototype the GUI using proto.io to produce the following:
This shows all the possible user interactions we will include in our project.
As well as this, we set up a website (this one you are reading right now!) for our portfolio where we can upload our research, design, notes, and blog posts. We decided to use Jekyll so that we can easily add new pages to the site without editing too much HTML code.
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