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Team Status Report for 09/18/2021

Hello World! This semester will see the development of a novel IoT cat tracking system, and we’re so excited for the road ahead! 

The past few weeks saw a whirlwind of activity as the team weighed several solution approaches for how to best tackle the problem of sensing cat illness. After meeting with Professor Mukherjee and our TA, Edward, we realized that our decision to make the project consist of several distributed components needed more concrete reasoning – why would a system of separate sensor tags be better than a large, single device. After re-evaluating the problem area of analyzing cat eating habits, we found that a distributed system allowed for more modularity and customization around users’ unique circumstances. For example, users with only one pet would have no need for tracking unique cats and thus could not justify the additional cost of a built-in RFID sensor subsystem. A modular system architecture would allow users to simply add or remove RFID sensor tags based on their need to distinguish between multiple pets.

The team also researched various wireless communication protocols and conducted a trade study between using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) versus WiFi for Tag←→Hub data transmissions. While the longer range of the WiFi standard made it a tempting pick, we ultimately settled on BLE because of its highly superior power consumption and lower development complexity. Lucas began searching for specific BLE modules and settled on a shortlist, to be written out as a trade study by next week.

Writing the proposal slidedeck was the bulk of this week’s work. With Proposal Presentations coming up this week, MeeDm has been practising extensively to prepare. We’re so excited to present this project and hear feedback!

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MeeDm’s Status Report for 9/18/2021

This week we’ve been working on setting up this website, finishing up our proposal slides, and met with Edward and Prof. Mukherjee.

I’ve specifically been doing some different things for the proposal presentation. One of the main things I’ve done is get any drawings done for the team to visualize our solution approach in abstracts and in our presentation. I’ve also finished up the slides for testing verifications, the gantt chart, and individual tasks and labour.

As for our meeting with Edward and Prof. Mukherjee, we had a great conversation on justifying some of the more fine tuned details our project. We spent the rest of the week deciding on what would be the best things to add to our project to improve on our web app as well as justifications for our design choices.

The last main responsibility I’ve had is generally organizing time management so we finish things on time.

I would say in terms of progress I feel we are on time. Our proposal presentation is almost done and gives ample time for me to practice my presentation tomorrow, and we have justified a lot of our solution and have a great plan going forward with the project.

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Tarush’s Status Report for 09/18/2021

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. 

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Lucas’s Status Report: Week of 9/18

Hello World!

The main team goals for this week were to finalize technical requirements and write up course documentation (gantt chart schedule, proposal slide deck, website, etc.). I mainly worked on the solution approach, preliminary system diagrams, and technical requirements.

TracKat Proposal System Architecture I also researched BLE modules, RFID parts, and weight sensors, and worked with MeeDm to conduct a trade study of using BLE versus WiFi. We ultimately settled on the BLE standard because of its superior power consumption and reduced implementation complexity. I researched the benefits and trade-offs of sensing weight via load cells versus force sensitive resistors – for our use case, the much higher accuracy and granularity achievable with load cells makes them the clear choice.

Throughout the week, I scrounged up free parts from the Robotics Club and Ideate Physical Computing Lab in order to spearhead getting a demo of our system running as fast as possible. I got basic RFID and weight sensing working with Arduino Unos and Nanos and will have Bluetooth ready early this upcoming week. I designed a simple load cell mount in Solidworks and 3D printed it, and will work on getting the whole demo together into a clean package this upcoming week.

Load Cell Mount 2 Load Cell Mount 2

Assembled Load Cell 1 Assembled Load Cell 2

Arduino Nano Bluetooth Module

Finally, our testing strategy initially assumed we would purchase a couple stuffed cats and implant them with RFID microchips. Instead, I ended up stumbling on Petoi, a company founded by some CMU grads. They made a project called OpenCat, an open source, Arduino based robot cat. Of course I had to print it out, and I found all the necessary parts (microcontroller, ultrasonic sensor, hobby servos, motor driver, and rf receiver) in RoboClub! Next week will see this pile of “managed chaos” transformed into our test cat, Shelley.