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William Foy’s Status Report for Oct 9 2021

This week was mostly spent listening to other groups’ design review presentations and giving feedback. I also helped JJ prepare for our presentation and he did a fantastic job. For our project, I continued to do some research for the chair module regarding the Arduino code that will interface with the capacitive sensor and the Xbee. I have been exploring XCTU and how we need to set up the Xbee modules. We also need to start ordering components, specifically Xbee modules. The ECE department should have RPis and Arduino Nanos that we can use. I also put in a request to get AWS credits for our cloud-based web app.

I think we are on schedule still. We will finish up our design review this week and then can dive right into implementation. Everything on the preliminary research end should be wrapping up soon.

Next week I plan to work on our design review document for submission Wednesday. I also want to get all of our components figured out, whether ECE already has them or we need to order them. Finally, I want to start testing the capacitive sensor with an Arduino as soon as we get on.

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Jonathan Cheng’s Status Report for Oct 9 2021

This week I spent the beginning part focused on my peers Design Review presentations, the last of which ended on Wednesday. After that, I looked mainly at the order list for my project component, the raspberry pi Data Hubs. Since the r-pi is the main course of the project component, there isn’t much to order on that front, as I can borrow r-pi’s from the ECE department. However, XBee modules do need to be ordered, and those are going on the list. In addition, I conducted more independent research on how I am going to write the embedded code for the r-pi, smoothing out some questions I had internally about the process.

I also took charge of writing this week’s team status report; the team has decided to go with a round robin approach for completing that weekly report. Early next week I plan to help write the Design Review writeup and get that submitted early. Then, I’m going to draft up some of the r-pi python code, and see if I can’t get my hands on a r-pi to test it on.

In terms of schedule, we’re right on track. It is currently the beginning of October and we are finishing up final designs and starting implementation.

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Nathan Ang’s Status Report for Oct 9 2021

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I worked on bootstrapping the cloud storage (MongoDB) and setting up the skeleton framework of the software stack. It is still a work in progress.

I also helped edit the slides for the our Design Review Presentation, which was a big focus for our group in the beginning of the week.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with my parts and feel confident moving forward. I expect the implementation part to have a lot more roadblocks, so I will be working hard in the weeks to come. I also expect shipping of necessary to take a while, so we will order parts soon (by Monday)

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

This week, my task it to continue working on the cloud storage and setting up the skeleton framework of the software stack. I will also help the team order necessary components!

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William Foy’s Status Report for Oct 2 2021

This week was spent doing further research in order to find a viable solution for the chair module that meets our requirements. At the beginning of the week, we thought we would switch to using a NodeMCU since it’s cheaper than an Arduino Nano, but then we switched back to the Nano since it consumes less power and we don’t need the WiFi capabilities of the NodeMCU.

I also found a new idea for the chair sensor, which involves the Arduino Capacitive Sensing Library. With some tuned resistors and pieces of aluminum foil, I think we can detect human presence on the chair using this library. More info can be found here https://playground.arduino.cc/Main/CapacitiveSensor/.

I helped our team prepare for the design review as well, which involved making 4 of the slides for our slide deck and working with JJ to prepare for his presentation. I think we are prepared to give a great presentation next week.

I think we are on track according to our schedule. After presentations next week we should be all good to start our implementation. We have a solid design in place with good requirements and a valid testing plan.

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Jonathan Cheng’s Status Report for Oct 2 2021

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.

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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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Nathan Ang’s Status Report for Oct 2 2021

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I completed research on a good software stack for our use case. I researched different types of popular web software stacks, but ultimately chose MERN due to its smooth learning curve and reported focus on efficiently creating an MVP, which is exactly what we need.

I also completed my slides for the upcoming Design Review Presentation, which was a big focus for our group this week.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with my parts and feel confident moving forward. I expect the implementation part to have a lot more roadblocks, so I will be working hard in the weeks to come.

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

This week, my task is to bootstrap the cloud storage (MongoDB) to be used. If done correctly, I can have an endpoint that the data hub can communicate to our cloud database via.

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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.