Weekly Update: Week 3

This week both the design team and the EE team ordered different components to start developing our new version of the solar energy system. We ordered an LCD touchscreen and researched ways to connect and operate the touchscreen without having to buy any other processing components that would significantly raise our cost. This option, as opposed to our previous LED array, seems to be a promising user interface that will be easier to understand and has the capability of being updated as the user’s energy needs increase.

We also bought different enclosures, as seen in the picture, that we will be testing in the next couple of days. These enclosures will be more durable and resistant to the environmental conditions of our communities in Zimbabwe than our previous iteration in Duron. Additionally, buying these enclosures instead of building them saves significant amounts of time and resources that will be used to develop other components of our product, like making the UI as intuitive as possible. ​

Some concerns that we currently have are whether we can successfully implement the LCD touchscreen without increasing cost and complexity. A limitation we might have is that the LCD could take all of the available ports in the Arduino, which we need for the power regulation of the system. Once we receive the screen, we will be testing whether there are other alternatives to join the LCD to the Arduino without using all the ports. Another concern we have is the complexity we might be adding while changing our main manufacturing process. We worked with laser cutters during our last quarter, but now we are pivoting to mills and CNC machines, and this transition might take some time for us to adjust.

These changes will allow us to meet the revised technical requirements that we defined at the beginning of our journey with this project. Specifically, the following requirements:

User Requirement --- > Technical Requirement

• System should be safe --- > All products incorporated to ours (i.e. solar panels, batteries) are rated properly at adequate performance levels
• Interface should be easy-to-understand --- > Any input/ouput plugs have to be designed so that it is obvious where they connect to. Anything that must be read (i.e. symbols, words) should also be easily understood by our communities in Zimbabwe. It should be rated 4/5 or better on our end-user survey.
• Box should be water resistant --- > Should survive 100% water resistant tests (spraying water from 10cm away) with no obvious electrical, material, and structural damage.
• System should be easy to transport ---- > System should be smaller than .5 X .5 X .5 m3 and should weight less than 8kg
• System should be durable and resilient --- > System should survive dropping tests (from 1.5 meters high) with no obvious electrical, material, and structural damage.

For next week, we are planning on testing and working with all of these components that we bought, and confirming that we are going in the right direction using an LCD touchscreen and modifying an outsourced electronic enclosure.

The EE team ordering LCD touchscreens while the sun was setting