[Alisha] Status Update 11.9.19
[System]
I submitted what should be a final parts order of everything we need to build a working MVP: more RPis to connect a series of hubs, more capacitive paint to design our proximity sensor grid, and solderable breadboards to connect all our sensor components together.
One of the more annoying challenges we encountered was with the design of the Pi Cap. While there’s a GPIO breakout and prototyping area on the board, there isn’t a straightforward way to access a power pin while the board is connected to the RPi. I’ve been communicating with support at Bare Conductive to see if we can engineer a solution that’s cleaner than our current one (below). While this works, it’s not compact or clean, so we’re brainstorming other options.
We also needed to solve the issue of narrowing the scope of our PIR sensor. Building a makeshift tube was definitely effective and we can probably design a 3D printed piece to have a cleaner/prettier solution for the final demo. We’ve ordered a few PIR sensors to test, but I anticipate they’ll all be fairly similar.
I did test print casing for our sensor hubs, but I think the dimensions are going to be changing.
After doing some research on this, we’ve made another important design change: eliminating the main sensor hub to aggregate all the sensor data. Since our sub-hubs are running with RPis, we can communicate effectively and efficiently with the UI directly and let the server aggregate all of the data! This eliminates a step from our pipeline and makes hub communication more streamlined.
[UI]
After evaluating our schedule during the interim demo last week, I put progress on the UI on hold for now. The priority is definitely the sensor system over anything else. My expected deliverables in the last update were definitely UI-centric, and those goals have shifted.
We’re confident in our updated schedule and looking forward to getting our full system up and running.
Deliverables for next week:
- Get multiple sub-hubs communicating with the server/sensor hub to test data aggregation across RPis
- Finalize our final demo setup — build a mockup of the study carrels with cardboard or foamboard
- Solder system components together, move away from many floating/moving parts
- Test and meet our timing requirements for response times
- Reading assignment #2