Project Development.md



#Project Development
This part of the course was longer for me than a couple of weeks. I managed to find access to a lab - FabLab UAE and am very thankful to Hashim for letting me use the resources of the Lab, and Steven for setting this up for me.

Page Summary

Project Management
Tracking progress
Development
Important and interesting links


Project Management


Murphy's Law - everything that can go wrong will go wrong. This has happened many a times for me in respect to FabAcademy.

Triage - I have some trouble with this. As I get easily distracted and go into the depth of things without zooming out in time to finish the assignments.

Documentation during development - Fighting procrastination to get better with this.

Demand- vs supply-side time management - Generally I used this for the last 2-3 weeks before the final project submission deadline.

Spiral development, DevOps - This is my favourite. I have started using this in my design practice and various other aspects of life.

Serial vs parallel tasks - I do both depending on the task, the time and the surrounding contexts.

System integration - getting better and better at this with time, documenting this is very difficult because of non compartmentalisation.

Finish quality - I believe in using materials in an honest way to hero their intrinsic properties and not hide them under aesthetic finishes. This makes the underlying parts neat and organised automatically.

Tracking progress


What tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain?

I kept a record of this by making a to-do list every week in my notebook and then assigning time for each task in my calendar. Here are some pictures of my to-dos:


What's working? What's not?

The OLED screen I borrowed from the lab, stopped working after I tried it with an Arduino Uno. I'm not sure what was wrong, but I checked every connection with a multimeter. I tried an I2C scanner detector but it still did not detect the device. I also tried it with a different programming board, and a I2C LCD screen with the same board. But after testing each connecting part, something in the OLED did not work. So finally, I got a new one.
The laser cutter I used at the Lab - a Universal Laser system, had a different kerf in the x-axis and the y-axis. I tried many different combinations of settings and materials. But still could not figure out how to fix this. Eventually I offset my tongue and groove joints different in X- and Y- directions.


I designed and made my PCB using an ATtiny44 microcontroller. Early on I figured that all the different libraries I would need to work the DHT11 and the OLED would not fit in the 4k storage space. So I desoldered the 44 and used an ATtiny84, so that nothing would change but the microcontroller. Eventually I discovered the tiny libraries for OLED and DHT - optimal versions of the full libraries and turned out the code used only 4136 bytes of storage space.
I made the first layout of the PCB trying to make it as compact as possible by keeping parts close together and traces more optimised on space.


Eventually, I changed the layout of the header pins that connect to all different input/ out puts and matched them to their physical location on the machine. This resulted in a much bigger PCB but a very neat layout of all the wiring. I planned it such that the wiring would neatly stretch on the side of the machine, but Neil suggested using a cable manager instead.


I also wanted to add a mobile application to control the machine instead of the physical regulators and switches as the last spiral development cycle including a wifi module.
What have you learned?
Through this project I learnt the most in electronics design and programming. The process of 'How to design a PCB from scratch for what you want the thing to do' as described in the weekly documentation was the most empowering.

Development