Category: Tarush’s Status Reports

This week started off with me spending a good amount of time in creating the final presentation for our project and then presenting it for the class and the professors.

I was also able to accomplish a lot of the goals I had set up for myself(which I spoke about in the final presentation as well) I have deployed the web app on the pi and the url on which it will be demod will be http://172.26.161.0:8000/

I also have pretty much wrapped up the UI for the web app and attached some pictures below for reference.

As mentioned in the presentation, we wanted to be able to allow the user to request the latest information from the tags through the web app and so I’ve been working with MeeDm on accomplishing that. MeeDm will be working with Lucas on getting the information from the tags and then converting them to a readable format after which my web app will then be showing them on the graph. I will be assisting with that as well in any way possible.

 

Integration! I managed to accomplish a good amount of work on my end this week. First being I wrote the script (fully functional) which will be responsible for sending out emails to the user when their cat’s food/water intake might reach danger levels (based on the analysis currently being conducted by MeeDm) I hope to demo this feature to Professor Mukherjee and Edward on Monday.

I spent a lot of time working on the integration between my part and MeeDm’s code and am pretty much done with the main components required. Now whenever users register themselves and their cats, I also store all of this information in a json file which can be pulled on MeeDm’s end where she can get necessary information like the cat’s microchip number, user’s email address, weight per volume, etc. and make the changes to the right file for the right cat when pulling in updated data from Lucas.

I also spent time brainstorming how to resolve a potential concurrency issue we might run into where my webapp might be reading and writing from the file the same time as MeeDm’s code and do have a solution ready to implement if we run into that case. However, the odds of this happening are quite low since we only pull data through the BLE every 4 hours. Hence, I am putting this on hold for now and will revisit this near the end if we do start running into this issue.

My next steps from here on out would now be improving the UI of the web app, deploying it on the RPi, and refining the graphs to be shown on the cat’s profile page (how many lines per graph, scale of graph, etc)

I suspect a good amount time will also be spent on my end preparing for the final presentation (I will be presenting) since that will be held right after Thanksgiving break. However, I do think I am still on track to complete my part as intended and can’t wait to see how our project turns out!

This week a lot of my time was spent prepping for the interim demo. In particular, I was able to show off users being able to have their own profile pages along with links to separate pages for each of their cats. On the cat’s page we can see a line graph displaying the data from their json file. I also have a button on the user profile’s page which upon clicking refreshes the cat’s database with the updated information in the json file, and hence the graph as well.

The next steps would be to get the graph to contain the updated information without having to click on the button as well as having an email system which sends an email to the designated user upon detecting a sudden change in the cat’s water and food amount. I need to start working with MeeDm on now having a fully integrated system between the web app and her python scripts where the scripts can access the json files created by the web app, read and write to them, and then send an email to the user if necessary.

I am currently on track based off of the updated Gantt chart and am excited as we begin to enter the final stretch of the class.

This week was perhaps the most stressful one for me till now. It started off with me attempting to connect the web app to our git repository. I do not have an understanding of the inner workings of how the Django web application functions, and for some reason, since the name of the git repository and the web app were both trackat, this resulted in the web app not writing and reading to and from the correct directories. To tackle this, I thought a simple fix of changing the web app name from trackat to something else would resolve this issue, however it only seemed to exacerbate it and I was no longer able to run our application (even after changing it back to its original name). This led to me having to spend multiple hours (more than 5) scouring the web on how to resolve the problem and fix the multiple errors that came up. In the end, I had to essentially rebuild the web app.

However, progress was still made this week. In particular, whenever a user logs into our web app, he/she is redirected to his/her profile page and from there can access the pages of the various cats they may have registered. I also have created a button functionality on our web app where upon clicking it we refresh our database with the new data that was sent to our cat’s json files. I’ve also been working on importing the Charts js graph library to work with our web app and hope to have a basic graph set up showing it reading the dynamic data from the cat’s database.

Because of some of the hiccups I ran into this week, I am a bit behind schedule (nothing too serious) but should be able to catch up this coming week and am looking forward to presenting my work in the interim demo.

This week most of my time was spent figuring out how to integrate the JSON files we will be using to store each cat’s info with the database and how to access them. Along with that, I made sure that whenever a user registers a new cat or is a new user themselves we add a new directory in our web app for them and in each directory we have individual JSON files for each of their cats.

By this coming Wednesday I hope to have created the profile page for each of these users which allows us to access the individual pages for each of their cats. I also plan on having the graph library setup and being able to take in dummy data and display it on the page. I am expecting to run into some roadblocks regarding the graph library as I have never used it before, but I hope to still have it up and ready this coming week!

 

 

Oct 10-16th:

I think it is important to mention the work I put in last week regarding the design report. Due to some issues, I had to end up writing at least half of the design report, requiring quite a bit of time from my end since a lot of it involved writing in detail about parts that weren’t my expertise. I wrote about the design requirements, all the design trade studies, the whole of project management which included the schedule, responsibilities, and risk management, as well as related work. I also spent time working with MeeDm on how we would want to use python for reading and writing data to and from JSON files to be further used by the web app.

Oct 17th – 23rd:

This week I worked on setting up the database for the users and their cats in SQLite. I also created a login and registration page where users can input their and their cat’s information like email, username, cat’s age, weight, etc. and it gets stored in our database.

I spent a bit of time with MeeDm as well designing how we wanted our JSON files to look like for storing the cat’s information as well as the directory structure for the different users and their cats.

My next goal would be to get the HighCharts graph library up and running where I will read in some of the dummy data we currently have and display them on the graphs. I’ll also spend time with MeeDm completely wrapping up and flushing out any other details left for communication between the Rpi and web app.

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.

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. 

I spent most of Sunday wrapping up our presentation slides and in the evening helped Lucas with his presentation speech and offered some pointers to include.  Along with that, I also started doing some research on what all technologies I plan on using for the web app. I also conducted some trade studies which I will be adding to our design report to assist me in finalizing that. Along with that, I spent some time brainstorming how I want the web app to eventually look like and added some pictures below.

My progress is a bit behind schedule (not enough to cause any delay) as I still need to finalize what database tech I plan on using. More research will be done on that tonight and will be finalized by tomorrow.

The next deliverable would be setting up a basic apache web server on the raspberry pi and setting up the django web app framework. Unlike my other team members, I’ve never worked with raspberry pi so I need to spend time familiarizing myself with how it works and hopefully setting up our “Hello World” demo should give me enough of a grasp on it.

This week we worked on writing up our proposal presentation slides based on the feedback we received from our meeting with Tamal and Edward. 

In order to broaden my scope for the project, I worked on figuring out more ideas for the web application that could be integrated into our project like sending email notifications to the user, adding a login system, figuring out different ways we could add more data analysis etc. Along with the web app, other parts I would be working on would be writing the code to analyze the information sent from our sensors to the Raspberry Pi, as well as converting the information to a JSON file to be read by our web application. 

As of now I am currently on schedule. My next steps would be to create a design diagram for what I would want the web app to look like and finalize on how I would want to implement it. I have also scheduled a meeting with one of the TAs to discuss the implementation as well.