Week 1 - Brainstorming Ideas and Selection of Implementations

We began our project by discussing exactly what we planned to do: Creating a small micro-controller based weather sensor which would transmit data to a traditional PC to display sensor information. We then began to split into pairs, and each pair was given a task. Alex and Katherine went to solder headers onto a FRDM board, whilst Surya and Herbert collected the sensors that we had ordered before the holidays. Anuraag and Qusai set about researching producing a Graphical User Interface with Java.

Katherine and Alex, once the FRDM board had been soldered, set about attempting to have the FRDM board communicate with a PC over a serial connection. Whilst the board could transmit information to the PC, we ran into issues regarding the reading and transmission of information. Meanwhile, Surya and Herbert had been having more success testing the sensors, and had been using an Arduino to measure their outputs. Seeing that the Arduino seemed to be working better than the FRDM board, the group decided we should shift focus to utilising it instead of the FRDM board in the final design.

Whilst Anuraag and Qusai continued to research GUIs, Katherine and Alex moved on to try and research another aspect of our plan: calling weather data from an external source to compare to our readings at the press of a button. Initially, we wanted to collect this weather data from the MET office, however the closest data they had available was from Crosby. Seeing this, we moved on to try the BBC. We found that the BBC had an RSS feed for weather, which we could very easily use to check current weather information. We were successfully able to create a Java program to call this information when required.

Surya and Herbert seemed to be having issues with the sensors however. Our temperature sensor seemed to be giving some very strange readings, and did not react to changes in environment. They opted to try the humidity sensor instead, and observed a better reaction but with strange values. After some research, we discovered that the Arduino method we were using to check the sensors output voltage was not directly outputting voltage, and instead converting voltage to a proportional integer between 0 and 1023. We implemented a new piece of code to convert this integer to voltage (reading*(5/1023)), but now saw no reaction at all from our sensors. We researched more, and concluded our code to convert the integer was using integer division instead of standard division, meaning all our outputs were being shown as 0. Again altering the code (reading*(5.0/1023.0)), we finally managed to get sensible value and reactions from our humidity sensor. We moved on to test the pressure sensor, and again saw good reactions, however our temperature sensor remained incorrect. Qusai went to search for a replacement we could order.

Katherine and Alex decided to look for a way we could read in the data transmitted over serial from the Arduino, but despite extensive efforts, this is still something we need to work on next week.

Surya Herbert and Qusai developed the Arduino code further to also calculate average values of our reading and output those as well.

We ended the day having made good progress on our project and ordered our new temperature sensor and a group Arduino to use, rather than the one Surya had brought from home. Over the week we will continue to research various parts of our project and next week we hope to make further progress.