Next Steps~
Power Design Improvement
Due to lead times, we were unable to get electronic parts in time. In our next iteration, we will improve our design by purchasing an inductor with more inductance to stabilize the voltage, by purchasing a p-channel MOSFET. This would replace the n-channel MOSFET currently used in our circuit.
Integration
Fully integrate the Raspberry Pi with the Arduino, power source, and physical housing. Integration was put on hold due to virus concerns. While we have prepared code and made design considerations for integration, we were not able to physically verify it. This is also why are demos showcase each aspect of the design separately.
Scale-Up
Theoretically speaking, our current model is able to run a total of 4 reactions at once, or 4 channels. However, there is the potential to scale-up even further by adding other Arduino units to the circuit. This could be an active area of investigation in the future.
Interface
We want to continue to improve the device's user interface. The current design has the Raspberry Pi menu and Arduino menus operating on different screens. One easy was to improve the interface would be to integrate the two.
Hardwiring
With COVID-19 disrupting the supply chains, we did not feel it was economically feasible to order PCB boards at this time. Normally, though, having a pre-set PCB board is inexpensive and greatly improves the experience for the user, since every circuit component has a labeled place that is easy for a novice to follow. As such, in the future we think the design would benefit from a PCB overhaul to replace having separate Arduino units.
Customer Support
Currently our customer support consists of the group email and an instructional guide we put together. Ideally, though, we could improve customer support by adding our own support forum like companies such as National Instruments or Arduino have for their products. A community model could provide better, more consistent support than 4 college students at a start-up company.
After a collective 320 work hours invested in the project and thousands of group messages, all we can truly say is wow. This project was a transformative experience. Before this project, we had collectively written maybe 300 lines of code in our MATLAB programming course. Before this project, the majority of the group had taken one electrical engineering based course, circuit analysis, two years previously and made circuits on breadboards from well-known schematics in circuits lab. However, it was totally different when you are presented a problem by your sponsor and told to find a solution to it. We had never designed a circuit from scratch and built it from the ground up. Katy had not taken circuits yet and was taking it concurrently when the project was first assigned. We did not readily have access to electrical engineering resources. Our group did not feel as if we were ready, but we rose to the challenge.
Our only faculty resources with some electronics prototyping background was Dr. Schuler with the physics department and Dr. Walker with the biomedical engineering department. With analog circuit development and later digital circuit development which became much more technical, most if not all the material was self-learned. This struggle was also further exacerbated by having to also concurrently learn about electrochemistry which in itself is a different beast. However, we persisted.
The key to success was maintaining a stable and healthy line of communication which allowed for us to seamlessly integrate our work together and pick up where work needed to be done to create a working prototype. Samuel had to learn how to operate LabVIEW and create a program from scratch to run our experiment in the first semester and later develop a program using Python to process our data and run the Raspberry Pi which would later control up to 4 potentiostat channels. Edward developed a working user interface in the second prototype iteration and active communication between the digital circuit and the user interface via LCD monitor. Kaleb pioneered the first circuit prototype and CAD for the hardware and housing. Katy developed the power circuit topology eventually used in the second iteration.
This project and our humble success would not have been possible without Dr. Schuler and Dr. Walker's love and support for their students. We are also incredibly grateful for the kind Tulane faculty whom we had the pleasure of interacting with this year and cheered us on. We are grateful for Brandon who gave our group a chance to work on this project. We grew because of the challenge and became better engineers because it. We are one. We are team ELKS!