WEEK 6

Date: 21/10/13

Introduction

Project design is the one of the phase that should had in develop a project. The purpose of design phase is to achieving project criteria with specific goals, specific tasks, and specific outcomes. The more specific, the better; the more closely aligned with traditional instructional objectives, the better. In this entire tasks for this week, it also including with some of the investigation for the components/equipments that will be used in this project.

Objective

• To design a project coincide with the main objective of project.
• To investigate the materials/components/equipments that will be used in the entire project.
• To combine all the materials that obtained suitable with the project designed.

Problem Encountered

Designing an efficient project need some of the experience in certain fields and basic knowledge in other matters related to the arts is highly needed. Without this criteria it would become quite difficult to design a project. However, by referring from several website it also may give some ideas that very helpful to designing a project according to the required design. In term of to find the materials that will be used, types of the material, product specification in term of the current/voltage rate that required in the project is highly encouraged to known for the purpose to avoid the material from damaged during test and build/assemble the material/circuit. However, this problem can solved by do some survey/research that required and record the important data for use in the future.

Project Description

Several important elements should be taken to design a project. Below is some question that taken into consideration in design a project.

1. What is the concept/theme of the project that want to designed?
2. What is the type of material that suitable to used? (i.e plastic, alloy, steel and etc).
3. Project size - how large project size that needed accordance with the project criteria.
4. What is the type of controller that want to used? (i.e u-controller - PIC16F877A, u-controller - 8051, Arduino Uno - Main Board and etc).
5. What is the materials that needed for I/O?
6. How much the amount of voltage/current needed for each electrical/electronics materials?
7. Is it additional material need to added to enable all electronics/electrical circuit functional perfectly? (i.e current/voltage stabilizer, pull-up resistor, filter circuit, variable resistor and etc).

From the list of questions above, the concept that will be used is simple and compact which is no need much space between the existing energy meter. Type of material that will be used to shielding the circuit is from plastic material. Size of project is more smallest than the energy meter. In term of their controller, Arduino Uno - Main Board will be used as circuit controller. Why Arduino Uno become first choice to make it as circuit controller in this project? It is because the Arduino Uno is one of the easy way to control the circuit including their program code. The materials that will be used for I/O and the additional materials including with the specifications for each materials will be listed such below:-

List of materials: 
Hardware 

1. Arduino Uno Rev3 - Main Board
2. Adapter power supply - 240VAC/5VDC
3. 2 lines x 16 characters LCD panel
4. LED
5. Buzzer
6. GSM module
7. Electronics Energy Meter (if any)
8. USB2.0 AM/BM
9. Casing
10. Wireless data transmitter and receiver
11. Various size of cable
12. Soldering tool kit
13. Potential transformer
14. Current transformer

Software 

1. Arduino IDE

Project Outcome 

As the outcomes in this project, the concept/theme of project design that will be used is simple and compact design which is coincide with the main objective of project. The materials/equipments/components that will be used in the entire project is such as list of materials above. Below is the illustrations, pin configurations and the summary of the specification of the micro-controller board:-

Figure 1: Arduino Uno board surfaces

Figure 2: Pin configurations

Figure 3: Summary of the specification

Figure 4: Main board reference design

As the conclusion, even have some problem in select a suitable material and an efficient project design, the main objective of project for this week is achieved perfectly. For next progress report, the budget of project will be discussed from broad to narrow.