For this week, our team has contributed the most of our time refining our use case requirement and design to ensure that our use cases are more consistent with our design. Specifically, we decided to remove the use case of avoiding chalk dust for our users but focus on saving human efforts instead. Moreover, we also reconsidered some of the required parts and decided to use solenoids powered by other power sources instead of Raspberry Pi to increase the force they can apply to our erasers. By doing all the work, we get a better idea of what our project should look like and what issues would it address.
Personally, I have also worked on designing and prototyping the different pages of our website. While the home page contains an interactive board for professors to select the section they wish to erase, the other pages allow professors to configure the classroom (board) and section settings, so we can generalize our system to boards in different classrooms.
According to our Gantt chart, my progress is generally on schedule. However, since I haven’t started working on the HTML and CSS due to being out of town for this entire week, I will spend extra time developing the hi-fi prototypes and writing the HTML and CSS of those pages in the following week. I will also collaborate with my team member who is responsible for the back-end to integrate the functionalities of the web application.
In response to the discussion question on Canvas, I think the course 17-437 Web Application Development (which counts as one of the ECE area courses) is particularly helpful in setting up the website. In addition, we learned a lot of knowledge about motors and solenoids while choosing the required parts of our design through communication with our team member who concentrates on hardware and through online research.