Week 5

Weekly Update 5

This week, we evaluated our progress on the project. We presented this progress to the class, and our project update presentation slides are linked here.

After our presentation, we made significant progress towards our technical goals. Hafsa successfully compiled and flashed software-uart code on the EZ430. This week, Ishaan and Hafsa interfaced the EZ430 with the HM-10 BLE module and confirmed the software-uart was successfully working with the BLE module by sending and receiving data from a BLE Scanner app on Ishaan’s phone. This was a big step in the right direction! Additionally, all group members tried to program the Adafruit nRF52840 board, and none were successful. We plan to cut our losses and opt for an Arduino Nano 33 BLE board, which we are confident will interface with Arduino IDE. Looking at the upcoming week, our largest goals are to implement SPI on the EZ430 to read accelerometer data and perform power calculations for both the collar and the base station.

Finally, we talked with our instructor about potential distinctions in our project. We decided a few options are to successfully interface bluetooth with the MSP430, design a PCB for our collar, implement a software feature for analytics on the data we gather, and test the system successfully on a real farm animal.

Individual contributions are below:

Ishaan: Ishaan tried to debug the nRF52840 board and met with Ishan (TA) to continue debugging. He also looked into SPI implementation for the EZ430 and has a compilable program that will be tested in the upcoming week.

Hafsa: Hafsa successfully compiled and ran the software-uart program on the EZ430. She also looked into SPI implementation on the EZ430 as well. A warning about alignment on the EZ430 was appearing when flashing the code, and Hafsa successfully solved this problem by changing the stack size. This was very helpful for Ishaan’s development also.

Tanpreet: Tanpreet started design work on the mobile application, considering core functionality and UI.