Author: jcheng3

This week was focused on research and implementation design for our Design Review coming up. Since Nathan and I switched focuses, I have been working on flushing out details regarding the Data Hub. Some topics that posed difficult design decisions were the communication protocol to use, the software to interact with the backend, timing requirements, etc.

In preparation for the design review next week, which I will be presenting, I was in charge of setting up the slide deck and assigned slides to each person. I also made 4 of the 12 slides, as well as creating the new block diagram for our detailed implementation approach.

Next week, after presenting the Design Review, I will be transitioning into working with Will Foy on exactly how to interface the XBee modules together, optimizing for power efficiency while maintaining data accuracy.

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.

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.