Week 5, Almost Digital!

Hello,

So this was a really productive week, my project finally started to work and I went to Austin during the weekend.

 

On the weekend we, Me, Bruno, Luis and Manuel, went to Austin. There we went to a solar car race! It was really fun, the cars were not so fast but it was really interesting to see that a car powered from solar panels can really work. After the race we went to the pit stops so we could talk with the teams, it was a great experience. On the next day we walk around Austin and saw some monuments and weird streets but that’s okay. We also went to Voodoo Doughnuts, a really weird doughnut store with crazy themes.

 

Then the week started and I start to develop the Digital Circuit. On the first day I had to figure out how the software was suppose to work and the functions that the system should have, right after that I started to put together the system on a breadboard. On the next day I finished the bread board design and started to do some testing on it and finishing the code, but I had a lot of problems and it took me a lot of time to figure out what the problem was, so then I decided to move the circuit to a Protoboard. So on Wednesday I finish the Protoboard design on the morning and did some tests on it, with those tests I found out that the MSP430 was draining the sensor batteries so I had to figure out how to fix it, so during the afternoon I did this but I didn’t had a lot of luck doing it then I decided to talk with Dr. Woods, he really helped a lot about how should I approach the problem and we figured out how to fix that problem. Then on Thursday I started to fix the prototype board as Dr. Woods suggested me and the results were really good! Then I had to edit the program so the circuit could work, but I was still getting imprecise measurements out of it so I putted a smoothing function so the readings precision got a lot better and I started to get great results from it! Then on Friday we, Oxycal team, went to a meting at Sunbelt Medical Corporation, in there they fix medical equipment and recondition it so they can sell it for a lower price. In there we talked with Bryan Millsap, he is the technician that fixes oxygen concentrators, that showed us how the concentrators works and what was the main problems that happens with them, then told us how he fix those problems and the things that are essential when you need to fix an oxygen concentrator. For the rest of the day I ordered some parts for the digital circuit and tried to learn how to program the new chips.

So that was my week, a lot of accomplishments were done and I really enjoyed it!!

 

Photo of the Code

Photo of the Digital Circuit

Concentrators at Sunbelt Corp.

 

 

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