Blog Posts – Team-09

That’s All Folks!!

Published:May 2nd, 2023

On April 26th, we had our Final Design Report (FDR) event, where we were able to show off our finalized prototype and where the project could go in the future. After presenting to our sponsor and giving a detailed overview of the project’s development and future steps, we got to perform live demonstrations of the prototype at our booth for anyone to see. Our presentation showed the transfer of data from scanning a tag to seeing it on the UI and receiving email notifications. We were also able to highlight the different antenna and tag configurations we tested over the previous months. The day was a great experience that allowed us to celebrate what we were able to accomplish over the past two semesters.

We were all very proud of our work and satisfied with the IPPD program as a whole. The project itself went through a lot of new topics we were able to learn about, such as RFID and the MQTT protocol, and we were able to learn how to manage a project with a multidisciplinary team. Coming from class projects where everyone has the same level of experience and there’s very little to submit or present, IPPD was able to give us a look at how a real company project is developed, including the various presentations, meetings, deadlines, and deliverables that are standard in our fields. We are excited to enter the professional engineering world and we feel that the lessons learned during the past two semesters have prepared us for the transition.

That’s all from us! Below is our video presentation showing the base functionalities of the prototype and what it can do to help Florida Power and Light. It’s been a pleasure working with IPPD and FPL! Thanks for reading and following our journey through this project!

Tagged as: FDR, InvestiGators, prototype

Prototype Finalization

Published:April 25th, 2023

Category:Spring Semester

Welcome to the April 21st, 2023 investigator blog post.

This week we work on finalizing our prototype. We obtained an enclosure for our product in order to house it neatly. We moved the prototype over into the new case and secured all the parts in place. Along with this, we have been getting ready for our final design review. We have been putting together the documentation that we will be handing off to our sponsor company, Florida Power and Light. This documentation will contain everything that they need in order to successfully recreate our solution if necessary. Along with this, we have included recommendations for future iterations as well as problems that we have faced with this version of the prototype and how we overcame those problems. Attached below is a picture of our new prototype in its new enclosure. We choose a clear case in order to be able to see the components while we are demoing our project.

Final prototype inside enclosure with RFID reader system on top and antenna on bottom.

Tagged as: FDR, prototype

Finalizing Enclosure and FDR

Published:April 16th, 2023

Category:Spring Semester

3D-printed enclosure to house RFID reader system

This week, Team InvestiGator worked on finalizing the design of the RFID reader enclosure and getting it 3D printed. The prototype of the box is shown above, with areas to hold the RFID reader, power sources, and other components.

With some delays in 3D printing and the end of the semester approaching soon, Team InvestiGator has been looking into alternatives other than 3D printing for the enclosure. Some alternatives have already been purchased, including a Pelican case that we plan to drill holes into to mount components and the antenna.

Team InvestiGator has been preparing for FDR in these upcoming weeks by preparing the video, poster, draft of the paper, and presentation. The team is actively working on all of these deliverables over these last couple of weeks and will continue to do so.

Tagged as: InvestiGators, prototype

FDR Preparations

Published:April 7th, 2023

Category:Spring Semester

Team InvestiGator recently completed a successful prototype inspection day for their senior design project. The project showcased the capabilities of their UHF RFID asset management system.

During the prototype inspection day, the team demonstrated the system’s capabilities to a panel of experts, who were impressed with the system’s accuracy and efficiency. The team received valuable feedback on the system, which they will use to make the necessary tweaks and finalize the design.

The team is currently working on improving the system’s user interface, making it easier for users to interact with the physical system. This includes On/Off switches and They are also working on creating a poster, video, and final design report that will showcase the system’s capabilities to potential users and investors. This has been somewhat challenging since no team members have much experience with poster and video design, however, with enough effort, the team should get it done!

Tagged as: FDR, InvestiGators, PID, RFID

Prototype Inspection Day

Published:April 3rd, 2023

Category:Spring Semester

On Tuesday, March 28th, we had our prototype inspection day. Three groups of judges came by our table to inspect our prototype and offer feedback. We presented the improvements we made since the last demonstration event, which included the PCB, power delivery, increased read range, improved user interface, and extra asset details added to the database. One of the last things we have to do is design a suitable enclosure for our prototype.

With the final design review approaching, we are working to get our prototype and documentation in order to hand off to Florida Power and Light.

Brady, Alex, Mitchell, and Jimmy at prototype inspection day.

Tagged as: PID

Preparing for Prototype Inspection

Published:March 26th, 2023

Category:Spring Semester

This week has been all about Prototype Inspection Day (PID), and making sure we are ready to present our current functionalities on Tuesday, March 28th. Our PCB we designed over the past few weeks has arrived, and our components have successfully been attached to it. After running some tests to ensure our flow of data is working, we are ready to showcase our current design and future plans for our final design. During the presentations, we hope to gain some feedback on the following:

Reader Implementation
- PCB design
- Power delivery
- Read speed
Database/GUI design
Possible enclosure suggestions

Overall, we are excited to show off our current progress and PCB implementation during Prototype Inspection Day. After we finish, we intend to start working on UI updates and enclosure designs.

Tagged as: PCB, prototype

PCB Finalization

Published:March 14th, 2023

Category:Spring Semester

Welcome back to the investigator weekly blog post. This week we worked with the software for the website to add some style changes to its layout. In these changes we decided to add an option to only display a specific amount of entries. This will make the users interface with the website easier.

We also continued to work on the hardware of the project as well. We altered our method of sending information to the database. Our old system would send the information as soon as it was scanned. This method had a defect that we did not anticipate. The defect could lead to us missing a tag while sending the information. We switched our process to send all the information at the end of the flight. Once we finalized our solution and made sure it worked on a breadboard. We designed a PCB in order to neatly house all of the hardware components together. A PCB will allow our prototype become closer to a final product. The overview of the PCB design is picture below.

Tagged as: PCB, Spring 2023, Website

Polishing Our Prototype

Published:February 24th, 2023

Category:Spring Semester

Team InvestiGator is currently in the last phase of development for this project. We have nearly finalized a working design with all the subsystems in place as shown in the image below.

As you can see, the microcontroller is communicating with the LTE module atop of it, and it is also communicating with the UHF RFID reader (green board). The database has been developed to show the tags and gps locations being read. Now that all the parts have been finalized (which was delayed due to some technical issues that came up this month), we intend on taking this breadboarded design and sending out a PCB version for manufacturing. The team has also purchased a new type of tag that could potentially increase the read range of our system.

Tagged as: Asset Management, FPL, prototype, RFID

Integration Continues

Published:February 20th, 2023

Category:Spring Semester

We continued working on integrating all of the components of the RFID reader system this week. As of this point, we are able to read RFID tags and GPS coordinates and send this data over a cellular connection to an MQTT broker. We have a server setup that subscribes to the MQTT broker, listening for data which it can store in a SQL database. We also have a UI which can display the data in the database. Our RFID reader is capable of reading from a distance of 20-25ft.

While we were integrating our components, we ran into a few problems which we still have to resolve. One of which was the delay time between transmitting a message to the MQTT broker and receiving an acknowledgement. While the microcontroller is waiting for an acknowledgement, it is unable to read additional RFID tags. We have several ideas for how to solve this, and plan on working to implement them in the coming week.

Some brainstorming of solutions to issues that came up during the integration process.

Tagged as: Integration, prototype

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