Approaching the deadline

Today the Lhamas began by doing a Daily Scrum meeting. A lot of work had been done over the Easter holiday, so we needed everyone to be up to date with the latest changes. Moreover, we discussed what still needed to be done in order to complete the project before the deadline.

For this we made an overview:

NodeRed:

- Clean up ui

- Implement count down timer.

Arduino:

- Make the three screens and display them with the corresponding locker states

- Add date, time and temperature to the screens

Design:

- Develop the concept through a few sketches

- Begin the CAD work

Presentation video:

- Make a story board

Prototyping:

- 3D print the QR code for the locker

For this we split up into three groups.

From the beginning we knew, that we wanted the locker to fit into a zoo/child friendly environment. To further explore how we made a few context sketches of how they would fit into their environment whilst still being modular and functional. We discussed the idea of the lockers being part of an environment where they can be used in a fun and playful way.

From this we began looking at the shape of the individual locker. To maximize the space and modularity we went with a basic shape paired with a locker door in an octagonal shape. To make the locker more interesting and fun, we discussed adding pictures or prints to the door - in this case it could be animal faces. From here we have began the CAD work.

In the meantime, we finished up the UI in Nodered by inserting a picture of our logo on the front page and a timer which would count down from 12 hours after a booking has started. The last bit was a bit tricky to solve, but after a few attempts we had succes with the node-red-contrib-mytimeout palette in combination with a function that converted the seconds to hours and then a separate display of the countdown shown in hours, minutes and seconds. The finishing touches were done and the UI was tested while connected to the Arduino.

The Arduino work also continued. Date, time and temperature, including a weather description, was added by reading current weather info in Copenhagen from http://api.openweathermap.org/. Because the current weather isn't updated every minute we had to get the time by reading the epoch time from https://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/europe to be able to display the current time. When having the time and weather under control we created the three screens and the visuals for them (lock symbols and an arrow to point at the QR code when the locker is available). The code for the OLED states was put in different if-statements in the loop to be updated every second (see a snippet of an if-statement below). When a specific OLED screen has to be displayed depending on the locker state, a string is changed in the callback-function which states which if statement is active in the loop. Now all the electronics for the smartLOCKER is finished.

Lhamas out.