We made fantastic progress this week! The chair module and data hub integration are nearly complete. Our final components arrived, including more Xbees and the batteries for the chair modules. We were able to configure everything and the chairs can now run off of battery power.
Going forward the only risks we can foresee would be the battery life of the chair modules not being as long as we aimed for, and also the frontend of the website not performing to our original specs. This next week the team will finish up testing which will include getting a metric on how long we expect the chair module batteries to last on a single charge. We also aim to flush out the entire frontend this week in time for the presentation and demo.
We made a small change regarding how updates are sent from the chair module to the data hub. We now have the chair checking for changes in occupancy every 5 seconds. If there is a change, it will send an update. The data hub also then sends current state to the backend every 10 seconds. This configuration allows us to meet the 15 sec requirement, even when a single update is not caught by the data hub in the worst case.
We also had to order Xbees with antennas since the original PCB antenna Xbees were sold out. This resulted in some higher costs but did not affect the functionality of the project. In fact the Xbees with large antennas should have even better range than those with PCB antennas.
Because of our great progress this week we are definitely on schedule now. This week we just need to focus on testing and finishing the frontend of the website.