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Team Status Report for Sep 25 2021

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?

Progress with the team has been excellent. This week, we focused on the project proposal presentations. It went very well! Great job to Nathan!

Some risks we face moving forward is the workload of our other courses. As the semester picks up, we all have more auxiliary work to complete. However, we are all on the same page about keeping our Capstone project a high priority. This way, we stay on top of the schedule and make good, incremental progress.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

Nathan has been switched to primarily dealing with the software stack, and Jonathan has been switched to dealing with the data hub components. This change was made due to a better fit of interests within the project. This will allow us to all make more progress in the project as we will be maximally engaged. Other than this, no changes were made as research is still going on for each aspect of the project. No changes were made to the schedule either.

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Nathan Ang’s Status Report for Sep 25 2021

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week I focused on the project proposal presentation. I refined the slides and put in time and effort in preparation. The presentation went well, and the rest of class time was devoting to listening to other teams’ presentations.

I also switched responsibilities to the software stack. I researched the pro’s and cons to different software stacks such as MERN  and MEAN, as well as various hosting services.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with the research and feel confident moving forward. Research will be wrapped up soon and I will start implementation soon!

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to wrap up the research with plenty of reasoning, and sync up with the rest of the team if they need any assistance.

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William Foy’s Status Report for Sep 25 2021

As we had proposal presentations this week I personally did not make much progress on our project this week. I helped Nathan prepare to give our proposal presentation at the beginning of the week, and I think we did well but also received a lot of good constructive feedback regarding areas we could have done better in.

I did a little research on my own regarding other embedded systems to use than an Arduino since we got some feedback on that. I think there are other solutions that are cheaper and smaller and can connect with an Xbee and chair sensor for our purposes.

I think we are on schedule, we need to wrap up our research this next week and set on what components we want to use so we can start ordering items if need be. We could have done a bit more this week since we mainly just listened to other presentations and gave feedback, so I think we need to get a lot done this next week in order to have a strong start on our project.

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Jonathan Cheng’s Status Report for Sep 25 2021

This week we had our class-wide proposal presentations, so all of our in-class time was used on listening to the other projects our peers are taking on. As such, I did not make much in-class progress this week regarding my research.However, we did have some meaningful discussions in preparation for our proposal presentation regarding division of labor.

In short, I am now switching over to researching the Data Hub portion (using Raspberry Pi) of the project. On that front, I have committed several hours of my time to reading through online materials regarding Raspberry Pi, the XBee Module, and the Zigbee Protocol. I have found multiple articles and walkthroughs that use similar tech stacks to what we initially planned, so these will be valuable when I implement the data hubs. After reading through these articles, I have narrowed down what materials we need for this portion of the project, as well as identified some challenges that we may face. For more information on the Data Hub research, please refer to our Design Notes document in the shared google drive folder.

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Nathan Ang’s Status Report for Sep 18 2021

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week I focused on researching of potential technologies for our project. Specifically, I looked into sensors to detect occupancy. I took a look into varying sensors (IR, Computer Vision, Pressure), and I started looked online for purchase options.

Also, I took up the task of dividing up work for the Project Proposal presentation and helped hash out a coherent schedule for the project. What stood out to me was how little time we had to realistically produce an amazing project, so I am now in grind mode.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

It is very early in the project and we just made the schedule, but we seem to currently be on schedule.  I have no doubts that conflicts will arise as we work on the project, but I looking forward to solving issues in our project together!

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This coming week, my task is to research the occupancy sensor side of the project. I will finalize a purchase on parts needed on this hardware side with plenty of reasoning. I can’t wait for the weeks to come!

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William Foy’s Status Report for Sep 18 2021

This week I focused on researching potential chair sensors to use to detect occupancy and also which microcontrollers and Zigbee modules to potentially use. During lab, I worked with the team to coordinate the development of our proposal slides and to narrow down which sensor would be the most feasible for our project. I personally made 4 of the slides in our slide deck and contributed to the Gantt chart for our schedule.

We seem to be on schedule since we will have our proposal ready to go by Sunday night. We’ve been doing significant research and I think we are at a good place in regard to narrowing down how we will implement a solution and meet our requirements.

Next week, in addition to hearing other presentations and giving feedback, I plan to help my team research more and further our design, specifically for the chair sensor component which I will be working on. We need to figure out exactly what sensor we want to use, and how to connect a Zigbee module to the sensor through a microcontroller.

 

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Jonathan Cheng’s Status Report for Sep 18 2021

This week I focused on coordinated research of potential technologies for our project. I was personally looking into software technologies for our web-app, as well as different types of sensors. During our mandatory lab meetings, we collaboratively conducted research for our project design and formed presentation slides.

In addition, I took the task of setting up our team website and writing our team introduction and project overview. This weekend we, as a team, will be preparing 12 slides (of which I created 3) for our Proposal Presentation. Research, design, and rehearsal will all be part of this week’s weekend meetings.

We seem to be on schedule, perhaps slightly behind on the research side. Since our product has multiple components that are relatively unexplored by the team, we have to make sure that we consider many viable options.

This coming week I plan to present our most promising software technologies to the rest of the team and finalize our tech stack for the web-app, and even start implementation of preliminary software components.

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Team Status Report for Sep 18 2021

We met with Professor Mukherjee and our assigned TA Joel to get feedback on our abstract. The feedback gathered included needing to refine our scope, figuring out which sensors to use, and coming up with more concrete requirements that relate to the problem we are attempting to solve.

We came up with a more feasible testing plan which includes testing 6 chairs, not an entire library. We also researched different sensors and embedded systems to use, including how Zigbee will fit into our system.

We worked on the slides for our proposal which are due this weekend. We developed a Gantt chart to schedule how we will meet our goals throughout the semester as well.