I have started writing a design document summarizing my work on the Smart Irrigation Controller. It is still largely incomplete
Redesigning the PCB board
There doesn’t to be a common pattern amongst breakout board for LoRa transceivers and GSM modules, so I based my design on the following components :
LoRa Transceiver : MTXDOT-EU1-A00-1
GSM Module : NL-SW-GPRS
Updated version of the PCB design can be found here
PCB Board Re-design
Almost all modules and breakout boards found on the market for LoRa and GSM include some sort of direct antenna connector. I did not look into the RF side of things, especially when it comes to PCB traces.
Final Deliverable for the Internship
This design document follows the Standard IEEE requirement document outline, which I have added here (Credits : Dr. Mazen Saghir, EECE425 - Embedded Microprocessor Systems Design)
Topics I have started covering :
Performance and expected power usage of the Raspberry-Pi model we are using in our prototype (Raspberry-Pi 3 Model B).
Specify all open-source and licensed software we are using, and which we will package into a standalone image to use with our Smart Irrigation Controller.
PCB Interface we’ve designed for the Smart Irrigation Controller, with a mention of what CAD tool we’ve used, any additional Symbols & Footprints we had to design ourselves, and which specific or general modules our PCB targets.
Compatibility issues & region our Smart Irrigation Controller is targeted at.
Web Interface for the Smart Irrigation Controller.
Planned use of the Levantine Mobile Application to control the Smart Irrigation Controller.
Add diagrams representing the systems and how its different components communicate.
Talk about the back-end system, explain its API calls and talk about analytics.
(Personal Questions) Further Career & Education related to Embedded Systems
What should I expect if I went into the field of Embedded Systems (Hardware & Software aspects).
What are the current ‘hot’ topics in Embedded Systems ? ( IoT Systems, Networking, Machine Learning, 3d Applications and Virtual Reality…)