We spent most of this lab hours researching the parts we need to assemble the REV D, the two websites we used are Digikey and Mouser, while looking for the parts, we also have one person updating our new REV D and looking for any potential errors that we didn't detect. One major error we found for Guava's designs and maybe Cranberry's designs since Guava uses Cranberry's solar charging chip schematic as a reference, we found out that the capacitor they used to store the energy from the solar is ceramic instead of electrolytic, ceramic does not store energies and this could be the reason why the circuit does not charge or dies quickly. Therefore, we would need to change up our shopping list a little, so we replaced the ceramic with the electrolytic, but since electrolytic is much bigger than ceramic. We would need to change up our design a little, which we plan to do it for the next lab meeting.

Overall, we manage to find all the parts we need to assemble up to 5 REV D, for Mouser it comes up to be around 79.56 and for Digikey, it comes up to around 81.45. Also, we sent Dr. Kuh our Ron Ho fund.

Members: Diwen, Riley, Max

Time: 3:30PM - 5:30PM

We spent the time today updating our new REV D with the electrolytic capacitor, our initial plan was to find a surface-mount version of it, but since the dimensions of it will exceed the space we have left, and we would want to minimize the size of the PCB, which is the goal of Team Guava. Therefore, we choose to have the breadboard type of it, which has two pins we can solder to. In order to find the perfect header for this electrolytic capacitor, we would need to find it's schematic online, where we found it from Adafruit. Also, since the breadboard version of the electrolytic is much higher, this might affect the size of housing and so. Therefore, we took the inspired from Team Apple, where we can bend the capacitor down towards the center of the PCB and it will decrease the overall height of the housing.

Overall, we manage to finish up the REV D design with the electrolytic capacitor. Our goal is to have Dr. Kuh sign our form before Spring Break, once we get back from the break, we can start soldering the parts and hopefully deploy this semester.

Members: Diwen, Riley, Max

Time: 1:00PM - 4:00PM

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Created by dlin on 2020/03/05 04:20.