There are several engineering courses where students are required to program and build hardware circuits with their microcontroller. Hardware connections made incorrectly can destroy or damage individual pins and in some cases the entire board. Additionally, some boards are damaged before being used by the student.

Students and professors often have the need to identify whether unusual behavior is hardware or software related in embedded system projects. Oftentimes, it can be quite cumbersome to diagnose hardware related issues that may occur on a microcontroller, such as damaged GPIO pins, voltage regulators, and other critical hardware peripherals. This presents a need to find a more expedient way to diagnose these issues when many students may require help.

This project will solve this problem by checking the functionality of the Arduino Uno and STM microcontroller hardware through a series of hardware tests. This will allow students and professors to confirm hardware faults or rule out any hardware errors thought to be causing issues. If hardware is not behaving properly, the device created by this project will display the hardware failures on a Graphical User Interface. Otherwise, the student or professor can assume their issues to be coming from software.

Team Captain:

• Hosted meetings

• Set goals and timelines

• Distributed work loads

• Tracked and reported progress

• Tracked Budget

• Ensured the team had every resource needed to be successful

Mechanical:

• Overall design

• Material selection

• 3D printing

• CNC machining

• Part tracking

• 10 Unit production run

Electrical:

• Cable selection

• Building wiring harnesses

Software:

• Contributed to the development of the software architecture

Misc:

• Laser cut and etched ESD grounding plate & front placar

Lessons:

A leader must accept full responsibility for their teams failures. And in success, must claim little to no credit to themself, but attribute the success to the members of the team, their talents and efforts.

Outcome:

This was a fulfilling project with many challenges. One of the challenges being the absence of a mechanical engineering teammate. Another challenge was managing the budget durring the pandemic and part sourcing.  Realizing this difficulty, we began our part sourcing early and across various vendors to fulfil our needs.  The drawback to this was paying shipping on every new order.  To offset some of the added cost, we chose to do as much in house production as we could including populating all 20 PCBs and 3D printing aproximatly 300 parts.

Overall, the team stayed on track though the 9 month project cycle, hit all milestones, completed all assignments on time, and maintained a productive and professional relationship with our sponsor and client.