Week 10,
Ideation Phase: Since I don't think I'll be using networking in my final project and also this week was just quite an overall hosed endeavor for me,
I kept it quite uncreative with the ideation. I did want to test ESP32's Bluetooth capability so I ended up designing my board based off the board on the HTMAA website.
Execution Phase : Soldering the board went well? I think I chose the wrong capacitor footprints as they were much too large and far apart to match
the capacitors we had in lab. Luckily, I was able to fix that issue with a good amount of solder. One concern I had was about my switch. There's a switch on the board to toggle the Arduino from 'program' to 'run'. I was unfortunately not
sure if I had routed the switch correctly when designing my board.
One unique thing about this board compared to my past weeks is that this board didn't use USB as its connector. Instead, it used a FTDI connection which is a 6-pin connector. The 6-pin connector is pretty hard to come by but when I was able to
get my hands on one, I got to work. I first used the
example code from Neil's website about creating a web server using the Arduino and having that display information. Around this time is when I had started to pivot my
final project idea so I began to see the benefit of using a server to display user input. Since my user input would be changing with time, I wanted to test the server with a value that was also constantly changing. I decided on the millis()
function to display the amount of seconds since the program had started running every time you refreshed the webpage.
Unfortunately, my program would start to crash after two or three refreshes. I wasn't sure what was going on but figured it was either some kind of memory issue or HTML response issue. As a solution, I decided to flesh out my HTML response
and surprisingly, my program started to work. I'd also realized
that for certain Wifi networks, the server wouldn't work e.g. MIT or MIT GUEST. Because of that, I just stuck to EECS_Labs wifi but definitely noted this down for future weeks.
- Alex