I’ve been in lab nearly every day this week to get us demo-ready by Monday. It’s been quiet but productive over the holiday. [UI] From the perspective of the UI, I’ve separated Hunt Library into several zones, with one sensor hub per zone and each zone containing up to 12 carrels. Our demo will have 3 carrels representing 2 zones, with 1 desk in one zone and 2 desks in the other. I cleaned up the UI to show the…
[Circuits] This week I implemented our Charlieplexing scheme with 4 pins and wrote up the Python code to drive those LEDs in groups (see photo below). We’ll be using a single LED per carrel and have them lit for available desks and unlit for occupied desks. From a design perspective, this is cleaner and less intrusive for a space that’s meant to be quiet and distraction-free. From a cost perspective, this allows us to maximize the number of carrels per…
[Problem-Solving] We had two primary problems to solve this week: (1) come up with a cleaner composition for connecting all our components together and (2) successfully incorporate the LEDs into our scheme (something we’d overlooked). Accessing the pins with the PiCap in place was cumbersome and offered limited access to the full range of RPi pins. We originally wanted to use a pin header between the RPi and PiCap; the intermediate pins we needed to access would be bent out at…
[UI] Incorporated the actual seat map of Hunt instead of the original generic map. Cleaned up some of the UI elements, adding a cleaner visual for the seat map and occupancy indicators. Started researching the feasibility of adding a live location feature to help students navigate to a given desk. [System] Spent most of the time working on connecting the sensor system to the app to make sure we have a completed pipeline from the PIR sensor to the sub-hub…
[UI] I’ve spent the week taking the app from the baseline wireframe design to a semi-functional prototype. Obviously right now it’s running on dummy data, but at least we have a functional design with our primary MVP component: a “live” map of available seating. The React Native/Firebase stack hasn’t been an entirely seamless process, so debugging that took up a decent amount of time. The next step is to integrate login functionality to the app which will be an interesting…
[Team] A little bit behind schedule this week as our design isn’t 100% finalized, but we’ll be working hard to catch up over the next week. Spent the front half of the week prepping our design review presentation. Ended up with botched slides due to some miscommunication, but it worked out fairly well in the end. We’ll be sure to amp up the detail for our design specs and metrics in our design doc (due tomorrow!), which has taken up…
Spent the week getting familiar with Raspberry Pi, testing sensors, getting power estimates, and preparing for our design review presentation. The capacitive proximity sensors just arrived, so we’ll be jumping into that early next week. Progress was a little slow for me this week with other commitments, but I’m still on schedule and getting closer to finalizing an overall design. [Sensors] Had some trouble getting set up with RPi for the first time, so a lot of time was sucked…
We’re on schedule and getting into the swing of testing various sensors for their effectiveness within the requirements of our project. Currently focusing on narrowing down our sensor selection after having collected more data from Hunt and having mapped out space in the D-Level cubicles to mimic the Hunt carrel measurements. [Alisha] This week we worked in tandem to improve our requirements and begin testing sensors. We checked out Raspberry Pis, ultrasonic sensors, a passive infrared (PIR) sensor, and a…