Week 2 - Implementing and Programming

Week 2 began by reviewing what had happened in week 1 and discussing what would be best to do next. We had met with our tutor earlier in the week and he seemed pleased with our progress. We collected our ordered components and again split into groups. Anuraag continued his research into Java based GUI's whilst Surya and Herbert began testing extra sensors we had ordered, mainly a new temperature sensor and a light sensor. Katherine and Alex continued in their attempts to develop a Java class that would be able to read information from a COM port which the Arduino would use to communicate with a PC.

Surya and Herbert had very little difficulty implementing the temperature sensor this time round, had had it relaying data relatively quickly. The light sensor however proved to be a little more difficult. While it reacted well to changes in light, we could not quite decide what the correct size of resistor to use to give a correct value of lux was. With no reliable way of measuring the lux in the room, we had to install apps on our phones, as well as use a website to find an approximate value, and then alter our code and circuit to represent this.

Katherine and Alex however had more success with the Java class. They successfully managed to create a class which could read data from a serial port, thereby giving our weather station the means to communicate with a PC.

Whilst Herbert and Surya worked on the light sensor and the Arduino code, and Anuraag began writing the first code for our GUI, with Qusai helping all of them, Alex and Katherine took the sensors we were confident in downstairs to solder them onto a veroboard, for the sake of neatness and ease of use. This went relatively well, however 1 sensor had to be re-soldered after it was accidentally put in the wrong place.


Surya had also ordered an Ethernet shield for our Arduino, in an attempt to have our weather station connect over a network. However, we could not connect to the university network with it, and so next week Alex will bring in some things from home to attempt to create a small local network to test on.


Once again, good progress was made, and next week we can focus largely on our user interface creation.