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Zeynep’s Weekly Status Report for 10/7

Accomplishments

This week, I primarily focused on completing the design presentation, working on the design review document, ordering parts/refining our bill of materials, and I began work on the web app. I spent time at the beginning of the week refining our design presentation by creating informative block diagrams and figures and cleaning up the slides.

I also began work on the design review document and transferring information from our design presentation into the document. I also refined the BOM and decided on some of the specific parts I would need for the solenoid system. I ordered the solenoids and I will begin ordering more components (such as screws, diodes, mosfets) later in the week.

I also began working on our web-app. This is my first time using Flask and html, so I spent time reading through documentation and learning about how to use Flask. After I read through documentation and felt more acquainted with the framework, I began implementing our wireframe web-app design into the actual web-app. I am currently focusing on having the basic layout of the web-app complete. After that I will focus on specific design choices for its implementation based on accessibility documentation to make it most accessible to our users. My progress is a bit slow at the moment as I get more used to Flask and html, but currently I have created home page and two separate pages for each feature of our website. I have attached to example screenshots of my progress so far. The user input on this page will be sent to the back-end of our code.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

My progress is a bit behind schedule at the moment. I have been out of town since Thursday, so I have not been able to devote as much time as I would like to working on the front-end. In addition, because I am out of town, I haven’t been able to work on my hardware component. In the next week, I will spend extra time to finish up the basic layout of the web-app so we can begin user testing, and work with Becky to design PCBs to send out during fall break. I also note that I emphasized finishing the solenoid circuit and encasing design, and testing prior to my weekend out of town so I would be ready to work on PCBs the following week.

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

In the next week, I hope to finish up and refine the basic layout of the web-app for user testing and finish up testing the solenoid system for PCB design by the end of the week. I will also complete the design review report, which I predict will take a good amount of my time this week.

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Team Status Report for 10/7

This week we focused on finishing up the design presentation and began working on our design review report. We have been working on consolidating our documents, refining our requirements and testing plans, and will continue to work on it throughout the week.

Design Changes/Risks/Mitigation Plans

We conducted more user interviews this week, which impacted some parts of our software implementation. One suggestion was to include a dictation option for users who may not have a braille display. We are currently looking into implementing this option. Another topic that came up through our user interviews was contracted vs un-contracted braille. Un-contracted braille is a near one-to-one translation and is a very simple form of braille. Contracted braille is for more advanced readers. Braille readers read both contracted and uncontracted braille. We were initially only going to incorporate contracted braille. We are now looking into having both options available to users. We also learned that there are two braille codes: one that uses 8 pins and one that uses 6. 6 is the more common form of braille. However, we do not want to risk losing information if we don’t use 8 pins. We are currently doing more research into whether we will need to add the two extra pins. If we do make a switch from 6 to 8 pins, we will need to update our timing analysis. The design of the system itself, however, will remain unchanged.

Another change we made to our design was making the web-scraping off-line. We wanted our site to take about .5 s to display results. Doing the web-scraping online was taking far too long and no one on our team has the ML capabilities to speed up this process. As a result, we switched to having the web-scraping offline and incorporating the results into a database to preserve our required speed. The database will work through keyword look up and will run much faster than our initial web-scraping algorithm.

 

[BLOCK DIAGRAM FOR SOFTWARE UPDATE]

Some risks associated with this design change may be that the database could still be too slow. In this case, we will use a google search. In addition, instead of storing the text file of the web-scraping results directly on our site, we will be creating the database each time we run the code, which may make testing tedious. Another risk we have at the moment is whether our current 6 pin system will properly represent all the braille characters we need.   

Please enumerate one or more principles of engineering, science and mathematics that your team used to develop the the design solution for your project.

Two engineering principles we used to develop our design were testability and maintainability.

  • Testability
    • To ensure an easily testable design we focused on creating a very modular design from the electromechanical hardware component all the way to our software implementation. The electromechanical embossing system is made up of many individual components that can be tested on their own before we integrate the system together as a whole. For example, the solenoids act as their own system that are attached to the x/y gantry. The x-axis and y-axis components of the electromechanical printing system are also separate components that can be tested by themselves. The software has each component of our algorithm in separate components as well: the translation, web-scraping results, UI, output encoding can all be individually tested. Overall, we designed our system to be tested easily to ensure success of our project.
  • Maintainability
    • Our product is made for visually impaired users. It is often difficult for visually impaired users to be able to quickly fix something if one of their devices breaks. From one of our user interviews, we learned that every time a part breaks or there is a malfunction in a device, the user needs to go through the complicated process of sending the product out and waiting at least a couple of weeks to get it repaired. We wanted to design a device that would either be easy to repair or very strong against wear-and-tear. As a result, we chose cheaper and more maintainable parts–for example opting to laser-cut our enclosure rather than 3D printer. We also chose our parts specifically such that they were reliable against wear-and-tear.
    • On the software side, we are including both a database with recipes/product information in addition to a search option. The database with product options provides more ease of use to the user however does involve frequent updating from our end as there are endless products that could be put out on the market. The  database allows us to maintain updated information on products rather than having to constantly add more websites to an online web-scraping alogorthim.
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Becky’s Weekly Status Report for 9/30

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

I created a CAD model of the x/y gantry, which honestly was quite a process because I had to convince myself the hard way CAD’ing our design from scratch was actually better than modifying a 3D printer.

Last Saturday I opened up Solidworks in the lab at Ansys and started downloading mechanical pieces to create the x/y gantry, and I noticed that the McMaster Carr linear rail and bearings were quiet expensive. I figured there was a cheaper way to source the mechanical components in the machine.  I looked on Amazon and I found a 135$ 3D printer. I figured that and a ramps board would be a quick way to get to MVP. We were advised against pursuing this route.

Here are some screenshots of the CAD.

This a general idea of what the internals workings of our embosser. We will have a way to feed paper using a driven tread that keeps tension with an idler tread. The treads will be positioned such that the paper is touching the tips of the solenoids. We will be adding screws to the solenoids so just the tip will likely be fine. There will be another linear rail with another tread on the other side of the solenoid.

This is the x gantry. The x gantry will be driven by a lead screw because lead screws don’t stretch unlike pulley based systems.

Here is the y feed system in isolation.

We were advised against doing an X/Y coupled system.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? 

We are right on time, we just need to order parts soon so we can begin testing this.

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

I want to order the parts for the x gantry system this week so I can begin manufacturing and making sure the parts fit together and reiterating as needed.