With some health crisis over the weekend I had a late start to the project. There are some things that still need to be completed, but this is a documentation of things that I have done so far.
I decided to:
1. be more experimental with the shape of the board (I decided to borrow some shapes that I tested in week 5)
2. use temperature sensor as an input
3. make a functional pcb board
I used an RTD Thermistor and XIAO ESP32C3 to read temperature input (ideally when the person touches the sensor). Here are the schematic and PCB design of the board. I wanted the sensor to be placed where the "finger" of the board is, so I did a little bit of line gymnastics to find the right size and the composition.
Soldering was also much easier this time. I forgot to take a picture during soldering, but this is how it looked like after it was plugged into the laptop.
Initially, I ran into the issue of "A fatal error occurred: Failed to connect to ESP32-C3: No serial data received" error message.
It turned out usb-c to usb-c doesn't work well for transferring data on my laptop and once I borrowed Gert's usb-c to usb-a, Arduino IDE was able to connect.
I managed to get into another error, where the serial monitor would not display anything. The Output window kept on getting stuck at "Hard resetting via RTS pin." I am stil trying to resolve this part.
Due to lack of time, the assignment is still in progress. Ultimately, the sensor at the finger tip of the board would take temperature data from the user's finger tip. Here are some things that I want to figure out by the end of this week:
1. make the serial port work
2. create another version with an LED as an interface to know if the code is working without the serial monitor
UPDATE
When I restarted the computer and resent the code, the serial monitor worked. The value that the RTD was reading isn't actually representative of the temperature. During class Neil recommended to use differential ADC to amplify the difference between two input signals. Will try that for the next iteration.
