Ashley's Week 12 Report

This Week:  Kevin and I met up to work on sending the apparent energy value to his database.  We practiced sending hardcoded multi-byte values to make sure that we could correctly separate the bytes, send them via the RS232 and reassemble them on his end.  Once we saw that this was working, I began sending him the actual apparent energy values from our chip.  Kevin read the values once a second.  The numbers were very consistenet on each level of power we tested: no power, 1 lightbulb, 2 lightbulbs and 3 lightbulbs.  Because Kevin was reading every 1 second instead of the approximate every 2 seconds that Andrew and I were doing when we tested it previously, his values were all shifted down which makes perfect sense because there is less time for the energy to accumulate on the energy registers.  As we added more power (more lightbulbs), the value went up and as we removed them, it went back down hitting the same levels that it did on the way up.  This helped confirm our consistency.  We even looked at Kevin's minute readings which take the second readings and average them over the 60 second interval.  You can see a picture of this below.  For the rest of the week we did not have a chance to do more work with reading values because Andrew worked on putting the circuit into the enclosure, building the power supplies and double checking his work so that we would not blow another chip.  This morning, Andrew and I met up and tried reading the registers to the SecureCRT terminal on my computer just to make sure that things were still working.  We fixed a couple of errors in the hardware but are still reading odd values off of the energy registers so we hope to have that resolved later this afternoon.

Next Week:  This next week we will solve the problem with the signal being sent to the chip.  We will also meet with Kevin and read values to his database so that we can take them and make an equation to fit those data points.  We hope to be displaying the desired data by next Tuesday and from there work on any final touches.  The final step will be making sure Kevin can get his site uploaded and live on the web.  Once we finish up with sending the correct data, though, we can get started on our 5 end points for the course.

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