March 13, 2017
EMAR’s V2 & V3 Hardware
Version 3 (V3) was dreamed up in Fall Quarter 2016, directly a result of the shortcomings of dealing with its predecessor. The goal was to improve reliability and collaboration. These goals have largely been realized with V3 even without feature parity with version 2. The approach taken with V3 has allowed us to compartmentalize the hardware aspect of the project, effectively turning a hardware project into a software project making it possible for anyone to contribute directly to the development without the need for the physical device.
In addition to this, a multitude of peripheral hardware has been replaced with one prepackaged solution in the form of the Raspberry Pi, which handles video and audio output as well as opening the door to a host of networking possibilities with onboard wifi and ethernet.
V2 was comprised of two arduinos, an audio decoder board and a video driver board (complete with a chintzy and fragile ribbon connector which quickly broke after a few uses) haywired together across a few breadboards. V3 has two core units, a Raspberry Pi and an arduino for interfacing with the neopixels. Though it may not seem like much of a difference, it has greatly simplified the hardware, reducing the number of fragile and possibly faulty connections to just the connection between the arduino and neopixels. V2 had tens of wires hanging around, V3 will have two!
Collaborative software projects need to be hosted in a way that everyone can work on them. Above is a screenshot of our github repository.
Debugging: Arduino vs Raspberry Pi
The possibility of debugging a code running on an arduino was nearly impossible. Software development was done at a snail’s pace and debugging was done with println statements, providing a bad situation. Yet another virtue of the new hardware and software architecture is the ability to easily debug! Because 90% of the project lives on the Raspberry Pi in a web application. It’s very easy to debug now which makes it great for introducing new members to the project.
Anyways, this is just a short sampling of what we’ve accomplished with V3. We’re looking forward to presenting the full working prototype next quarter and getting something stable into the field.
