EECE 380 Design Studio III
Memorandum #8
March 23, 2014
To: Dr. David Michelson
From: Jacklyn Dang, team leader
This memorandum serves as an update for progress of the EECE 380 Design Studio III team, L2C4, during the week of March 17 – 23, 2014.
A high level design of the system was determined this week. We planned to follow the third option in our previous memo, “off-shore surf forecasting system.” This system will involve wind, temperature and wave condition sensors that will be sent through an analog multiplexer into the Q4000 microcontroller. The Q4000 will be programmed to periodically switch between each input of the multiplexer to read each sensor’s data, subsequently transmitting the data via email after a given amount of time cycles. The email will then be received by the ECE server where a local web server will parse the data and display it in a web page for surfers to view.
Hardware Updates:
For our power management system, we will be using three sets of solar panels in series that are capable of producing 20 V and 200mA. This will be used to charge a battery that will power our sensors. We will be using two electrical sensors (temperature meter and accelerometer) and one electromechanical sensor (wind turbine). We will send these three sensors, as well as the current voltage of the battery into the Q4000 through a multiplexer, since there are only two analog inputs. Voltages from each of these inputs will be read periodically by the microcontroller, and then an average value over approximately 10-15 cycles will be calculated and sent to the server via email. We expect to send updated data at least once per minute, if the microcontroller can handle this traffic.
Software Updates:
The embedded C code for the Q4000 is currently programmed to receive a single analog voltage, store on the FFS in a *.dat file, and then later read from it. The timer has been set up to periodically transmit an email containing the data along with a time stamp. We successfully forwarded the data in the body of an email from Gmail to our ECE webmail account within the “.orb” folder. After running “myscript.sh”, we were able to retrieve the email body and store it into a text file locally.
Our software design will involve having a Python web server running on the host PC to periodically run the shell script to retrieve data from the body of incoming emails. All data will be transmitted in JSON format for efficient parsing from both ends of our communication process. The Python server will parse the incoming JSON that contains a time-stamp and reading for the appropriate sensors, which will be displayed on a web page, hosted by this server.