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Team Status Report for Oct 2 2021

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.

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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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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.