Previous Semesters

During the Spring of 2020, Team Gauva acquired two new members, Max Mochizuki and Riley Sodetani. They were familiarized on the board functionality and design using breadboards and schematics. One of the first tasks that was accomplished was boot-loading the AMTEGA1284P, with the help of former SCEL member, Kenneth. Team Guava next reviewed the REV CIV schematics to tackle the solar charging circuit design. It was determined that the capacitors on the solar charging circuit were magnitudes smaller than necessary, so the appropriate changes were made in Autodesk EAGLE.

During the Spring of 2018, Team Guava successfully designed the first iteration of a more powerful sensor module using the ATMEGA 1284 microprocessor for the lab and populated four boards confirmed to successfully and reliably boot-load and program except for one board.

Initial data shown improvements over its predecessors. It also increased computing power, local memory, and battery capacity. With this new design, SCEL’s sensor modules will be able to accommodate more sensors application software.

After populating our boards, we found some errors in our first schematic and PCB design. We found out that we're missing reset connection for bootloader, missing several data connections, and missing a reset button circuit. We added connections on our boards by using jumper wires to test program. Program successfully polls data and displays data polled, but does not transmit packet correctly. However, our board broke during the debugging process for the XBee. We tried to deploy our board on the roof but then right when we closed the lid for the housing, data from our weatherbox wouldn't transmit anymore.

Next semester, Team Guava will deploy a finalized design and use initial data to optimize the modules performance. We will optimize power consumption, including reset button, and update to new solar sensor. We will also build sensor breakouts on main PCB to reduce costs. Lastly, we will revise our schematic and PCB to fix some issues we've encountered this semester.