Building the Device - Day 3!! - We are almost there !!

We made great progress on the third day of building the device. We were able to complete the mechanical part of the device and also test the electrical part of the device.

Completing the Mechanical Part

So on Day 1, we were able to make the wooden clip and on Day 2 we were able to complete the clip assembly and we also prepared the float ball and the rod which would fit into the shaft. We've also soldered all LEDs, potentiometers, buzzer and resistors to wires and finally we've started coding the micro-controller.

Day 3 involved smoothing out the parts of the mechanical wood assembly and finally assembling them. We were able to attach the rod from the ball to the pipe shaft as shown below

Ruben and Quadri and completing the mechanical assembly

The completed mechanical assembly with the pipe shaft attached to the pipe rod

 As you can see from the picture above(right), we were also able to attach the potentiometer to the pipe shaft. So the mechanical part was completed.

 Completing the Electrical Part

So we needed to attach the wires, LEDs,resistors, buzzer, potentiometer to the microcontroller. We also needed to upload the programmed code to the microcontroller and test the whole system to make sure it does what we wanted it to do. After we did all the above, we did a first test of the electrical system only while it was wired to the potentiometer.

Moses and Seyi making sure the wires are firm enough for the potentiometer

Writing the code that runs our prototype

Moses fixing wires from the micro-controller to the pot attached to our mechanical assembly

Moses, seyi and gafaar debugging the code for our system

The finalized circuit that would complete our prototype

Our work bench for debugging and wiring

Assembling the mechanical and electrical parts for preliminary testing

Preliminary Tests

For our preliminary Tests, we decided to attach a tap at the base of our plastic tank so we could be able to drain the water away when we needed to. We drilled into the plastic and attached a tap at the side bottom

A tap attached to the bottom of our plastic tank. Water was already poured in the tank for testing

Below is a video of the operation. The first test didn't go as we wanted, the alert buzzer didn't sound when we wanted it to but hey! that's why we needed to test it in the first place. The first test enabled us to see our mistakes in real-time and correct them. 

So by Day 4, we should assemble the whole device with the plastic tank and the microcontroller, attach a switch to a battery that would power the microcontroller so we could turn off the device when we wanted (when the tank is full and you have been alerted successfully to put off the pump), and test it thoroughly to make sure it works without any errors.

So the next post would include a video of the full operation without any errors and bugs hopefully.