internship week 5

Fifth week of my internship here. Progress has been good and continuous. I have ordered a few devices from Adafruit such as the screen and the USB dongle. I connected up the screen to the breadboard to show a few images. The applications of this screen would obviously be to show a clock face or certain images. I also installed the dongle to my laptop. I also boght a Google Nexus 4 smartphone so i could go into researching of the applications market. To my surprise, there have already been several completed or testing Android applications which uses the Bluetooth LE function to communicate with the board such as Nordic Bluetooth application or the Red Bear Lab Bluetooth controller which are all quite cool. I plan to do something like that for my product. That's the end of my update to the hardware part.

I also had to send my prototype for printing in Singapore Polytechnic. I designed a C4D object which would be the body of my product. Initially i thought i could get to use the rapid prototyping room in SP to do the printing, however when i went down the lab technician told me i had to get approvals to use the 3D printer in school. i sent an email to my course chairman and he helped me to forward the email to the in charge of the MAE department, however i received no reply for the whole week, thus i decided to give up on that idea and instead just used the 3D printer which the DEB lab provides. It is just a makerbot and i had to learn how to print the models all by myself. Some processes include downloading the makerware software and changing it into xtl file before converting it into another file frmat before the 3D printer would even accept.

While waiting for the 3D printer to print, i did not waste the time i spent in SP, i also researched on how to create the Bluetooth LE application on eclipse, even learning various videos tutorial from Youtube. I learnt how to use the sample application in which a user provided on Github. All the approvals problems wasted my first trip to SP as by the time i could get to the 3D printer in the DEB lab, it was already too late as i have also not installed any of the programs. Thus the most regretful part of this week is i had to spend two days in SP before i could even complete a small 3D printing.

On friday, i also met up with my supervisor in the morning and told them about my problems regarding the lack of input and output ports which was available on the small Rfduino board and thus he handed me another microcontroller which was slightly bigger but had more digital and analogue pins which i could use thus i started from square one, downloading all the applications need to programme the board.

That concludes my hectic week 5 of rushing from my office to SP to and fro. Hope the following weeks will be better and that the progress of my board would steadily improve.