Overall, Bluestamp has been a great experience and I have learned a lot about different kinds of engineering. This was my first time doing a program that was so engineering intensive and I had not been exposed to much engineering in the past. All I knew was that I had a small interest in building and design and this camp sounded like a good opportunity to explore that. This camp was so much more different that I expected from the very beginning. On the first day, I was already building my starter project within half an hour of walking into camp. Bluestamp was focused on independence and I was mostly researching solutions to my project instead of having lectures. This camp has also piqued my interest in hardware engineering and has opened up a potential career path for me.

For my final milestone, I put the finishing touches on my safe. I cut out spaces in my box to fit my fingerprint scanner and keypad along with a small hole for a charging cable. I also glued in my servo to created a lock mechanism and added a Liquid Crystal Display to display text. Another feature that I incorporated was a buzzer to make a “beep” sound as I punched in numbers and once I successfully unlocked my safe. Furthermore, I finalized my code and made sure all my connections were secure to prevent connectivity problems. A few issues I had to overcome were some of the connections on my PCB which were not soldered correctly and had messed up my circuit. I used a multimeter to check the voltage running through different places to find out where the problem was. Once I found it, I just soldered the wires back together. Additionally, using a Dremel to cut out spaces in my box was long and tedious work and I ended up doing a shaky job. However, I was able to file out most of the rough edges and have my components fit tightly. Unfortunately, I cut too much for my LCD and there was extra space on the top and bottom. Since it fit well horizontally, I was still able to make it fit into my safe. To make sure my components stayed in my box, I superglued them in.

Link to my final code

Bill Of Materials

Build Plan

For my second milestone, I incorporated my fingerprint scanner into my project. I had a system where when I entered the correct password on my keypad, my fingerprint scanner would light up and I could scan my finger. If my fingerprint was recognized, then my servo would turn and I could press the hash key to return my servo to its lock stage. This milestone was more difficult than my first because my fingerprint scanner was more difficult to connect and program. At the beginning, I had trouble getting my fingerprint scanner connected to my Arduino because my connector had ends that would fit my scanner, but not on a breadboard. At first, I cut off the ends and soldered on ends of male wires so I could connect them to a breadboard. That ended up not working because the wires would fall off, so I had to get connecters that had male heads already built into one end. I also had an issue with getting the correct amount of power to my scanner. I did not know how to create a voltage divider at the time and I spend hours trying to figure out how to get power to my sensor and how a voltage divider worked. After I got that to work, things got easier. I loaded some sample code onto my Arduino to enroll my fingerprint and then added some code to my main program. Unfortunately, my servo would twitch in between the time where I enter my passcode and press my finger to the sensor and I plan to fix that in my final milestone. Additionally I will also be transferring my wiring to a PCB and putting everything into my box.

This is a link to my code