With our preliminary model working and able to cool ambient air by an appreciable amount, our team has begun to look into temperature control and sensing, as well as the building and assembly of our final prototype.

Bing Hong and Justin delved into the world of Arduino code to learn how to add a temperature sensing control interface for our product using a rotary encoder to do so. Through experimenting with the code, they learnt that Arduino codes tend to have lower processing speed. As such, they tried to split the code into an if-else loop to reduce computing stress. However, the speed is still insufficient to detect changes to the rotary control, making concurrently drawing on the LCD display too taxing for the system. This resulted in a non-detection of the rotary encoder inputs.

Segment of our arduino code

From this, we learnt that the arduino code is sufficient for sensing and display, but fails at direct user control. This means that the user cannot set the temperature of the air cooler to one that he is most comfortable at, and can only tell the temperature of the air that is being blown out of the model. Moving forward, we will be using codesys as the main control platform, which Zhen Xuan has been learning more about!