This week was a bit rough for team productivity. We started off the week finishing up the design presentation, which was given by Greg on Wednesday. After that, focus shifted back towards the Design Report. We realized one critical area that was underdeveloped in our project plan was our schedule, which up until now hadn’t been incredibly well fleshed-out.
We decided to totally redo our project schedule from scratch. In order to get a clear view of exactly what the project timeline looked like, we first wrote out a set of milestones and detailed subtasks related to them. By essentially “rubber-ducking” the project tasks, we were able to much better account for every necessary step involved in achieving each milestone. For example, our first milestone of having website commands control a stepper motor generated 7 subtasks: prototyping the main board; connecting the Esp32 and stepper drivers; getting FreeRTOS running on the Esp32; getting the GRBL firmware running on the Esp32; getting the Esp32 running custom software; connecting the Esp32 to WiFi; and finally getting the website backend to send and receive basic HTTP requests. Many of those subtasks also spawned their own sets of constituent tasks. The main board prototyping subtask, for example, would require a schematic, board layout, and finally home fabrication.
Running through the now much more complete and accurate accounting of the project tasks gave us a much clearer picture of what the next month would entail. This exercise also brought to light several areas of the project concept that we had been too vague on. We were forced to much more closely consider and write out how several parts of our project would interact.
As mentioned in the beginning of the report, this week was light on direct development work and as a result, we have slid a bit behind our schedule goals. We will have to make up for this in the coming weeks. The immediate next step is to generate a proper gantt chart schedule based off of our now much more complete set of development tasks. This task ToDo list is posted on the site, and can be downloaded from our Documents page.