[Charlotte] Status Update 11.9.2019
What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
This week Alisha and I worked together on tasks more than we have in the past few weeks because we are in the process of bringing our whole project together. Last Sunday and Monday morning we got ready for our demo at the beginning of the week. It was on Wednesday that we actually demoed. After that, I worked on researching how to write a script that would automatically execute upon a power up of the RPi. I ended up creating a launch scripted, making it an executable, and then adding it to the crontab of the Rpi. Now when the Rpi reboots the python client.py file begins running which is the file that checks the status of the sensors repeatedly every 3 seconds. I also tested the PIR sensor with a tub around the sensor to narrow the visibility of the sensor. This greatly increased the performance of the sensor, and makes me more confident in it. I will include an image of what this looks like at the bottom of this post. Finally, Alisha and I worked together to connect the pi cap to the Rpi with wires, rather than directly pushing it on. We realized this was necessary because even though the pi cap gives us access to 6 or 7 unused GPIO pins of the RPi and ground, it doesn’t give us access to a voltage source, so we have to manually wire all of the 40 pins so that we can reach the voltage source. after doing this we ran code to make sure that the PIR sensor was still behaving properly and the pi cap, to insure that we wired the two together properly and this is a viable solution to the problem we were facing.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
Part of the demo that we had last week involved proposing a new updated scheduled. Based on that schedule we are right on track with where we should be with this project.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Currently, there is not much progress we can make on the sensor system portion of our project until the parts we ordered last week come in. Since everything except the Pi Cap and conductive paint was ordered on Amazon last week, we should be getting most of our equipment at the beginning of this week. Once we have these parts we would be able to check that out sensor system is working with multiple sub hubs.
In terms of other things we plan to accomplish this week, I believe we need to finalize how we will be doing our final demo in terms of getting foam-board and building a “carrel” and determining the mapping of how much conductive paint we want to use on the table top. We also need to decide how we will enclose our sub hubs now that we are wiring each pin on the Rpi to the pi cap instead of just plugging it on. I also plan to make a few small changes to the code on the Rpis this week to improve its style and the way each sub hub deals with multiple PIR and pi cap sensor values. Finally, it seems like a long way away, but I think it would be a good idea to start working out the final design doc.
What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
Previously I believed the PIR sensor was a big risk, but now that we have tested it with a paper tub on it to block its range of visibility, I am much more confident in its ability to produce accurate results for our project. The new trouble maker in our project is how we will keep all of the wires plugged in from the RPi to the pi cap since we are no longer pushing the pi cap directly onto the RPi. Alisha and I plan to consult our Professor and TA about this next week to see if they have ideas.
