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Team Status Report: 10/9

This week, MeeDm presented our design review presentation. Way to go MeeDm!

The team spent most of the week working on the design report while each member also made progress in their own area. Lucas developed the schematics for the prototypical bluetooth tags, Tarush finalized the development stack for the web app and got the RPI 4 hub set up with Django, and MeeDm conducted further research on what constitutes irregular cat eating habits – to that end, she reached out to her vet but has not yet heard back.

With the demo tag hardware built, MeeDm and Tarush will begin working on integrating the full tag-to-hub pipeline, while Lucas will primarily work on getting the tag pcb layouts finished and ordered. We have also finally received our shipment of BLE module development boards, so Lucas will be able to start tag firmware development in earnest.

The primary, current project risks still mainly have to do with hardware development timing as well as parts availability and logistics. Another risk involves spending too much time on course logistics and material such as the very pressing design report rather than actual development.

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Tarush’s Status Report for 10/09/2021

This week a lot of my work was spent on logistical issues, primarily conducting trade studies for finalizing the tech stack we wanted to use for our web application as well as working on the design presentation and helping MeeDm prepare for her presentation.

I also had to redo the Django and apache web server setup, since before we were using the raspberry pi 3 and now switched to raspberry pi 4. Surprisingly, the process was quite a bit more involved and I ran into a bunch of troubleshooting difficulties in getting them up and running.

We had sent out an email to MeeDm’s vet last week regarding, but unfortunately have still not received a response regarding the cat’s eating habits and indication that something may be wrong, hence delaying my finalization of the UI for the app. If we still do not receive a response by Monday, I will be proceeding with the original design I had in mind which I tested with other people who own cats on what they would want the app to look like.

This week, the first half will primarily be spent on writing up the design report due on Wednesday, after which I will be working on creating the UI for the app.

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Lucas’s Status Report: 10/2

This week mostly had me tied up by a pretty tight crunch at work, but I still got through most of the goals set out for this week. These were mainly to get the demo hardware working as well as finalizing the BLE module trade study and selection. I also worked with MeeDm and Tarush on the Design Proposal presentation.

One of the most unexpected hurdles in choosing the BLE module ended up being totally unrelated to technical trade-offs: logistics. As it turns out, the world is experiencing a really bad semiconductor shortage, and the supply chain for ic’s and mcu’s has been left in a rough state as a result. Almost all the options I considered ended up having to be scrapped due to either a development board or module not being available – in some case’s the ic itself was out of stock with lead times ranging from 18-52 weeks!

In the end I settled on the DA14531 BLE module. The primary points I considered were power consumption, ease of development/implementation, and supply chain; the DA14531 knocked each category out of the park. This IC features an ARM Cortex-M0+ processor and achieves absolutely top-of-the-line power consumption specs of under 22µA/MHz clock rate and 240nA hibernation mode. Dialog Semiconductor provides ample documentation and has an active forum – critical to ease of development. Finally, the IC and its accompanying evaluation boards are in stock and readily available from a number of distributors, including DigiKey. With the order placed, my focus will now shift towards getting the prototypical schematic and layout finished for the BLE tags.

Speaking of tags, I also worked on the Arduino-based demo hardware and completed assembly of the RFID bluetooth tag:

The tag features a coin cell holder, headers for an HC-05 Bluetooth module and RC-522 RFID reader, and power switch. It’s quick, it’s dirty, and it works. Along with the load cell based weight sensing tag, this RFID tag will allow the team to develop and test the full project pipeline on real hardware without waiting for the actual BLE tag pcb’s to be spun up. Next week I’ll wrap up the demo hardware by putting it in a nice, custom-made enclosure. I’ll work with MeeDm to get it connected to the RPI and I’ll work with Tarush to have the web-app display communications between the demo hardware and the RPI hub.

As I learned the hard way this week, a new risk to consider is time commitment at my job. Going forward I’ll have to actively temper my responsibilities there with my work here.

 

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MeeDm’s Status Report for 10/2/2021

This week we have been prepping for our design presentation. I went through the slides and outlined all of them in the beginning and then also finalized slides for communication between the hub and the devices as well as the hub and the web app. Additionally I did the diagrams for the web app.

In terms of work on the project, I did research, set up the raspberry pi 3, ordered things that we need, and started writing my code to connect to peripheral devices and connect to them. In terms of research I found some links where others have done similar things using a packet called bluepy, which is a python library that allows you find and connect to devices, then read in packets. It uses bluez, a bluetooth stack that raspberry pi 3’s use. After setting up the raspberry pi, I’ve started a python script to start scanning and connecting to devices. Additionally I’ve ordered some cat bowls, microhdmi to hdmi cables, and a usbc cable to start hooking up our raspberry pi 4.

My goal for next week is to start the multithreading portion of the python script and present for the team.

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Team Status Report for 10/02/2021

A lot of the team’s time this week was spent setting up our environment to get ready for development. We ran into a number of road blocks getting our raspberry pi setup in lab but were able to figure it out! We also realized we needed to immediately start placing orders for the things we needed to buy and hence we bought cat bowls, microhdmi to hdmi cables, a usbc cable, and our bluetooth low energy module.

We also received feedback during our meeting with Professor Mukherjee and Edward on what all they expect to see in our design presentation, so we worked on incorporating that in our slides as well.

We are extremely excited for the excellent presentation our fellow teammate MeeDm is about to deliver this week! With our development environment now mostly set up, we’ll begin properly developing the project and working on the design report next.

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Tarush’s Status Report for 10/02/2021

This week a lot of my time was spent doing research on finalizing the tech stack I want to be using for my web application. We will be proceeding with using Django as our web framework, python for the backend, and a combination of vanilla javascript, html, and css for the frontend. I am also pretty confident of moving forward with SQLite for our database management, but will still confirm that it covers all our requirements as opposed to having to rely on MySQL potentially. More information on the trade studies I conducted will be added to our design review report due next week.

I also spent time helping in creating our design presentation slides. We received really useful feedback from the professors and Edward on what all to make sure we talk about and include in the design presentation. One of the things we realized we could have done a better job of explaining was what the web application would potentially look like, so we included a diagram as well as as detailed information on the functionality of the web app.

A lot of time was also spent in getting set up for development. I spent time assisting MeeDm in setting up our raspberry pi in lab as well as getting our apache server and django framework running on the pi. I am now able to connect to the raspberry pi remotely and can start development immediately. I added two pictures below, one of the Django framework being setup successfully as well as the web app being deployed on port 8000 locally.