While hardware and designing stuff was being settled, we had to decide on our controller – and oh boy was this a nightmare. One of the days we started to experiment on Arduino Mega setup for 3D Printing that was available in the MnT lab. It was a long day at lab trying to code for DS18B20 temperature sensor to measure temperature and print the values in degrees Celsius and degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily Tony and Qijie were guiding us through it. Though Arduino seemed hard at first, we soon managed to somewhat figure out what the codes mean and hence decided that Arduino will be our controller of choice.

However, Tony informed us that Arduino is very limited in what it can control and hence suggested using Raspberry Pi instead. He also introduced us to Wago and Codesys, which was basically an information overload. Stressed, we were very unsure on how to go about controlling our system. We then decided on going for Raspberry Pi that would control our Arduino and also our GUI.

After spending few more days/weeks coding on Arduino, Tony suggested switching to Codesys and Raspberry Pi altogether as it is much easier and can control more things compared to Arduino, which is our approach now.