A quick recap of what we did during the past weeks: we are designing a dehydration band to remind the users to drink water. In the last week, we have successfully tested our customized sensor on the regular Arduino and we also generated a hand-made circuit.

This week, to improve the precision of our circuit, we made a silhouette-cut circuit. It looks very beautiful, right?

To make sure the mini-controller, a mini-Arduino, connect smoothly to the silhouette, I needed to solder the pin to its corresponding copper tape. I had to be extremely cautious because the signal for each pin was independent from others. If I soldered two pins or two copper tapes together, the system would malfunction. In other words, the dehydration detection band could not detect the humidity level of user’s skin properly. Then, I needed to place two mini-resistors on the side of the mini-controller. Once again, to ensure the connectivity, I needed to solder the resistors to the circuit. The picture below was the motherboard of our Dehydration Band. Next we would integrate the sensor to it.

(Someone’s hand is holding the sensor)

Because we needed to place the integrated circuit into a 3D printing band in the end, we had to attach our customized sensor on the back of the motherboard, where the sensor could contact user’s skin. At first, I only used the slim copper tape to connect the sensor to the motherboard. However, resistance detector displayed that there was no connection at all. Then, I realized that I still needed to use solder to solder the sensor to the motherboard. Next, we chose a small button battery and soldered it to the mother board. As you can see from the picture below, this is the final version of our prototype. After the last four weeks’ multiple attempts and three experimental prototypes, now we are so close to the end of our project.

In the following week, we will import the tested code to the mini-controller and place the integrated motherboard into 3D printing band. Then, we will do the final prototype-testing and make trivial adjustments.