Summer Project Part 3: Putting it together

In the first post in this series, I outlined my plans for my Msc summer project and what I'm going to be doing. In the second post, I talked about random number generation for the data collection.

In this post, I'm going to give a general progress update - which will mostly centre around the Internet of Things device I'm building to collect the signal strength data.

Since the last post, I've got nearly all the parts I need for the project, except the TPL5111 power manager and 4 rechargeable AA batteries (which should be easy to come by - I'm sure I've got some lying around somewhere).

I've also wired the thing up, with a cable standing in for the TPL5111.

The power management board there technically doesn't need a breadboard, but it makes mounting it in the box easier.

I still need to splice the connector onto the battery box I had lying around with some soldering and electrical tape - I'll do that later this week.

The wiring there is kind of messy, but I've tested each device individually and they all appear to work as intended. Here's a clearer diagram of what's going on that drew up in Fritzing (sudo apt install fritzing for Linux users):

Speaking of mounting things in the box, I've discovered OpenSCAD thanks to help from a friend and have been busily working away at designing a box to put everything in that can be 3D printed:

I've just got the lid to do next (which I'm going to do after writing this blog post), and then I'm going to get it printed.

With this all done, it's time to start working on the transport for the messages - namely using LMIC to connection to the network and send the GPS location to the application server, which is also unfinished.

The lovely people at the hardware meetup have lent me a full 8-channel LoRaWAN gateway that's connected to The Things Network for my project, which will make this process a lot easier.

Next time, I'll likely talk about 3D printing and how I've been 'threading the needle', so to speak.