Progress for our team has been going great. This week, we focused on narrowing down our design in preparation for our design review presentation. Nathan has been diving deeper into the web app and cloud/database side of the project and has scoped out a great plan. JJ has been doing further research for the data hub and how we will implement a solution using a Raspberry Pi. Will has been scoping out the chair module, which includes deciding which type of sensor, microcontroller, and battery to use.
Going forward, there are many technical risks regarding the design we have chosen. After presenting our design in the design review, we will go forward with trying to implement it that way, but we might have to adapt and change plans if things don’t go how we expect. Some examples include if the batteries we get don’t connect or perform as expected, or if the chair sensors aren’t accurate enough.
We changed our design to use an Arduino Nano for the chair module instead of a NodeMCU, due to the Arduino consuming less power (hopefully). Also, we are going to switch the chair sensor to possibly using a piece of conductive aluminum along with the CapSense Arduino library. This change is something we’ll need to test, so we might still go back to using the load sensors, but those would be much more expensive and require an amplifier board. We didn’t encounter any significant changes with the web app or data hub.