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Cryptoucan™ Manufacturing: Keypad Testing

Written by Lída Hrnčířová on 2019-08-08

cryptoucan

Have you ever wondered how does the testing process of Cryptoucan™ look like? Well, here's your chance to see how we're testing our keyboards. Today's article includes recordings of the robot we built for this - that's something you need to see!

We are carefully testing every part of Cryptoucan™ - software as well as hardware. Most of the firmware can be tested using usual methods of software engineering (CppUTest[1] for example).

But when it comes to hardware, everything gets a bit more complicated. We've already covered the testing process of Cryptoucan's display in our previous blog posts Simple CV in Racket[2] and Cryptoucan™ Manufacturing: LEDs Revisited[3].

Another important feature to test is keyboard. Doing this manually is extremely labor intensive because there are many scenarios to cover.

Picture 1: Cryptoucan So we built a robot to speed things up!

If you want to see the robot in action, click here.

The Robot---------

The most straightforward approach to emulating user input on keypad is to touch keys with a finger-like object. Keypad is capacitive, so we used a short steel rod with a bit of conductive foam on the tip as a "finger".

"Finger" is mounted on a SCARA[4], which is assembled from 3D printed parts and some hobby servo motors controlled by Arduino. There's a compensation for servo gear backlash in software, as our application does not need extreme precision.

Picture 2: The Robot

Picture 3: Raspberry Pi display You can watch all the parts cooperating in this exclusive video!

Video 1: Cryptoucan™ Manufacturing: Keypad Testing  

That's all for this week, thank you very much for reading!

References

  1. More info: https://cpputest.github.io/
  2. Read more in this article: Simple CV in Racket
  3. Read more in this article: Cryptoucan™ Manufacturing: LEDs Revisited
  4. Wikipedia contributors. (2019, July 3). SCARA. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:56, August 7, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SCARA&oldid=904579013