Senior Design. The capstone project that every engineer dreams about.That is until you realize you need to write a 120 page paper 😳
An alumni approached us with this illustration and asked, can it be built?
And we said, Yes. We have the technology.
Our project has us building a device which would aid crab fisherman in concealing the location of their buoys. The idea is that is that if the buoy is hidden then poachers will not steal the crabs within.
So how did we build it?
We decided to use a Bluetooth module called BLE113. It's a nifty little chip because it contains a Texas Instruments micro controller within it, allowing you to program it with BGscript for basic I/O.
One person on my team had the bluetooth background so we bought a BLE113 breakout board. We decided to design a board which would work as a shield and snap into the breakout (no thank you SMD soldering).
This is the board that I designed. I used Eagle this time.
Key features include two parallel batteries to power the micro controller, a 9v battery to power an actuator for the locking function, a button for Bluetooth advertisement and a buzzer. We also designed it to include a sophisticated sleep mode chip but we never had the luxury of time to implement it.
This video illustrates the tech allot better. Yes, I deserve a Grammy for my acting.
I designed the housing on TinkerCad to fit the board and actuator. Got it printed with 100% fill on 3Dhubs.com for about $60.
We then found this really clever 3D printed actuator design which would fit a servo. This came in handy as we modified it to fit our application.
Here is what all of the plastics look like after printing and with the actuator.
Glue, solder and batteries later left us with the following finished product.
