What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
I built 2 more study carrels so we now have a total of 3 study carrels built out of foam poster board. I also painted sheets with the conductive paint. I worked with Alisha to get the wiring ready so that she could solder the PIR sensors on a solderable breadboard. I created wedges from left over scraps of foam at different angles that we used to test the best angle for the PIR and them used them to install our PIR sensor under the shelf of our study carrel. We tested the painted sheets, but were not thrilled with how they were preforming so we tried tin foil instead, and that seems to preform better. We assembled a whole carrel with both the capacitive sensor and PIR sensor and were happy with how it preformed. Before we had updated our crontab so that our program could run on boot-up and would not need a monitor; however, we realized that was causing problems and got ride over those changes and updated the .bashrc instead so that we can now run our program on the RPi in headless mode.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
We got a whole lot done this past week because we wanted to make sure that we were in good standing before I left to go home for Thanksgiving. I believe we are still on track assuming we don’t hit any unforeseen roadblocks while we finish stuff up for our demo the Monday after Thanksgiving.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
I will be working on CADing up wedges, cones for the PIR sensors, and boxes to hold our sensor system. I will also continue working on our final design doc and the presentation that will be given the last week of class.
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?
I believe the sensors are the riskiest part of this project. We have been doing our best to test the sensors out early on in condition similar to the environment they would be used in by building study carrels and testing them that way. Alisha is less confident about the capacitive sensor while I am less confident about the PIR sensor. However, I believe the fact that we built our carrels and have tested our sensors in the study carrel before the week of Thanksgiving gives us enough time to iron out any uncertainties.
This is a study carrel built out of foam poster board. The PIR sensor is attached under the shelf of the study carrel and the Pi Cap (capacitive sensor) is attached to the tin foil laying on the table top.
