This week was mostly integrating all parts of our system together and performing tests. The functionality of the website is complete including bidirectional communication which allows the user to turn one or more of the work zones on, turn off all lights, enable a security protection mode to turn off microphones and motion sensors, and control the weighting of the sensors manually.
I added a range input element in the form of a slider which allows users to control the percentage of weight from PIRs to microphones on their own end sending the information to the Raspberry Pi. Diva and I worked together to design the optimal way for the weights to be implemented when being changed in the system. We decided that there will be two base weights (one for the PIR and one for the microphone) which serve as the value by which the counter for each work station increments when a sensor detects a positive value. Multiplying these by the percentages the user sends to the Raspberry Pi when moving the slider will change the increment value, and thereby a PIR sensor will be “worth more” and increase the counter threshold by a larger value than a microphone, should the percentage be specified as so.
We also performed preliminary testing with three base stations in the 18-500 lab. I worked on some of the circuitry for disconnecting and attaching the LED lights to the breadboards to be set up as stations in the four work zones we will have (we currently have three). I also ordered another set of PIR sensors as we were missing a fourth one for our final station.
The rest of the week primarily entails testing all of our edge and use cases and working on the final presentation which I will be presenting. Diva and I spoke with Professor Yu on Wednesday about our testing plans, and he mentioned it would be useful to think about how to best present our testing data. We need to demonstrate the physical range of our sensors and so we plan on having plots that illustrate this with distance from the center of the PIR in feet on the x axis and the value the sensors (logical 0 or 1) on the y axis. We will also perform a similar series of tests for the microphone application.
We also want to make a user survey to conduct behavioral testing of individuals and their preferences and comfort level with data gathering sensors such as microphones and plan on doing this this upcoming week.