interior design

interior design – main compartment

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Tackling the main compartment was one of the most crucial part of the device, which we worked on & off throughout the whole design process, since it hold all of our electronic devices and sensors. We wanted everything to have a snug, not tight, fit so that it will be able to handle any motion be it abrupt or gentle and the parts will not collide with each other inside this compartment.

Screwing in the main compartment into the buoy, this is how it turns out. We also designed a tumbler sort of disk attached to the bottom of the main compartment to insert the sensors in and to ensure that it does not move around too much. The sensors will end up being extended past the main compartment into the protective barrier in the bottom (refer back to the main overview for a better idea).

After placing in the Arduino board and the batteries in their relative compartments, this is how it looks like. Everything fits! (YAAAS)

interior design – top lighting

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After some behind-the-scenes testing of prototypes, we decided to add a ring of LED lights around the top of the device to allow for easier debugging and testing by the user when problems eventually come up.

Previously, we found difficulty finding out the problems unless directly connected to the Arduino and reading off from the console. When testing the device on-site, we cannot ensure the device is appropriately working without checking the cloud server.

With the installation of the LED, it allows for easier checking of the device when doing long-term testing. If there is any error in the program bootup, the LED will turn red signaling something is wrong. This can help us, while testing, to see if any connections are missing or if the code is wrong. The LED also shows progress of the code being processed. Colorful lights mean the boot up is successful.

The LED will shine a solid ring of light that shows the progress of taking data samples and transferring it

interior design – circuit design

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After we were done with the main body, we moved on to tackle the main code of the device. To get a better picture of how we wanted the circuitry to look like, we first drew a general sense of the circuitry  (as shown below). We then went ahead with the coding.

After much testing, everything was finally running smoothly and we designed two PCBs and printed it to fit everything in our body. One of the PCB works to connect the arduino and the sensors, and the other is to connect it to the antennae for the communications system.

interior designing – overview

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We catered more than a week’s worth of time to this stage of our designing as we wanted all the pieces to be snuggly fit. This is to prevent any damage to the fragile sensor due to abrupt motion.

Due to our poor time estimation, we may have ordered the electronic parts a little too late, so all the design work had to be done without the exact measurements of the parts any than those that were provided on the pages that we ordered them from. So…fingers crossed and let’s hope that everything fits right.

Our contingency plan, for if the compartments are too tight, is to use a soldering iron to hopefully be able to heat up the acrylic enough to compress the sides enough to fit the parts in. If the compartments turn out too large, we will just have to glue (one that is aqua-friendly) the parts to the compartments.

I will be breaking down the individual interior parts in more detail in the next few posts. For now, enjoy the curated gallery!

main compartment
circuit design