Update 1 - Week 7 Monday (& Prior)

During the first portion of the class, our efforts were mainly focused on finding a problem to solve and later brainstorming ideas for a solution. After finding our problem, we quickly came up with the idea of an indoor environmental monitor. Shortly after, we chose parts and began to design our PCB.

Choosing parts

Choosing multiple sensors and ensuring compability was a bit of challenge in regards to the pin budget of the esp32 breakout board. We ended up going with sensors + esp32 board from Adafruit for ease of ordering, compability, and documentation. To organize our materials and ensure compatability, we created this google sheet.

PCB Design

Choosing parts was honestly more challenging than designing the PCB. Because we are only using breakout boards, PCB design was relatively straightfoward. Other than routing, the main challenge was power budget. Because we are using both the 2.2" TFT LCD Display and the Adafruit PMSA003I, connecting everything on the onboard 3.3v regulator would overload it. This necessitated the use of an external 5 -> 3.3v LDO to create a second 3.3v rail. One additional note was that we had to create our own custom symbols + footprints for the breakout boards by converting the Adafruit Eagle files to KiCAD and extracting the edge cuts/reading the pinout.

Current Status

Currently, we are still waiting for our parts to arrive. Currently, we are in the process of researching various libraries that we can use to interface with the sensors and display in addition to setting up a git repository for our project. The content of the timeline has been "compressed" from week 5-9 to week 7-9. If we get the parts this week, should have the sensors tested + PCB assembled by the end of the week.