Jiayi’s Status Report for 12/9

  1. This week we spent most of the lecture time on the final presentation. Our team has completed most of the building part and is focusing on the testing. This week, I presented our final product and worked together with my teammate to ensure the network connection is stable and out devices can all communicate through the network. In addition, we worked on finalizing the testing in usability and speed.
  2. My progress is on schedule since we’ve successfully completed all the designed tasks in our schedule. We are working on final report already but should spend a little more time early next week so we can submit everything on time with high quality.
  3. Next week, we will make sure the entire system works stably during the demo, and submit final video and final report after we finish collecting last piece of data on speed specified by rpi code vs. actual speed of eraser.

Team Status Report for 12/2

  1. Currently, we do not expect that there exists any risk that could significantly jeopardize the project with high probability. However, we do acknolwedge that our system doesn’t yet have a protection on motor driver to ensure it doesn’t burn under high voltage. The way we manage the risk right now is to provide moderate amount of power so that the system works properly without approaching the voltage and current limit of the motor driver. Next week, we plan to explore into whether we could add more robust protection so that the project is less likely to function incorrectly due to such a reason. Specifically, we plan to look into adding fuse suggested by our TA.
  2. No significant changes are made to the system as we’re approaching the end of semester and would like to keep our working version of the system. We do plan to demo the project locally since there isn’t much difference for demo’ing purpose whether or not we deploy the project and we would like to save some budget on that. In addition, we updated our use case requirements on power consumption and erasing latency according to our new use case when we work on the final presentation. But they are slight changes and don’t affect how the system work.
  3. Schedule doesn’t change.

Jiayi’s Status Report for 12/2

  1. As the semester approaches the end, our team is working on finalizing the integrations in order to have a full working system. As a result, I personally focused on exploring various ways of ensuring communication between the camera, webapp, and rpi so that the information can flow as expected when the user of the webapp clicks on the button to erase the board and take pictures of the content. In addition, I also worked with my teammates to ensure our erasers have the exact correct pressure applied on the board so that the motor can drive it to erase the content. Today when we test the system, it works as expected in erasing when given the instruction from the webapp.
  2. My progress is mostly on schedule with some user testing work to do next week. I will allocate enough time next week and recruit participants to finish the user testing.
  3. Next week, we hope to have the system run stably and have participants do user testing with our webapp and the entire erasing system.

Jiayi’s Status Report for 11/18

  1. This week I worked with my teammates together on building the physical components. We bought a lot of wood blocks and sheets to connect each part of the erasing system and stabilize them. While we build the system, we spent a lot of time on ensuring the dimension of the wood we cut is accurate enough for the system to work, and we also spend time on figuring out what force is best needed to erase the content.
  2. Our progress is mostly on schedule, but we need to finish setting up the communication between webapp and RPi by this weekend. In order to keep us mostly done with the project, we plan to work a little more this Sunday to finish the above task and finish most of the assembling of physical components.
  3. In next week, we hope to show a first version of our website/RPi controlling the erasers in our physical system to erase the content on whiteboard and tasking pictures.

Jiayi’s Status Report for 11/11

This week, I spent some amount of time preparing for interim demos and making sure the logic of webapp works fine together with Wendy. At the same time, Xiaoyu’s code for RPi was ready, so I worked with her to conduct experiments on deciding the voltage, current limit, and speed of motor control. After making sure that our motor moves at expected, we meet again to discuss about building everything together using wood and screws. So we spent some time planning on the detail of how we will build the system and what items we need to purchase, and we made the purchase this week so we could get started soon early next week on building the physical parts together.

My progress is mostly on schedule, but this week we originally planned to build the physical components but weren’t able to do so because we’re still waiting for the materials. To catch up the schedule, we ordered some key components ourselves and will receive the material very soon to get started on building next week.

I plan to have the entire system put together next week (we’re missing communication between RPi and webapp + physical components). This could allow us to have sufficient amount of time on testing.

Weekly Question:

The tests we plan to run are: image capturing latency test. web application usability test, erasing functionality test, overall system test. The use case requirements include making functionality of capturing the image, providing user a web interface to access erased content, and erase the board automatically. We test these three aspects individually, and overall we test the entire system and perform user test to ensure we meet the use case requirements.

Jiayi’s Status Report for 11/04

  1. Earlier this week, I spent some time with my teammates discussing about ehtics considerations in our product. And as our team starts on the major building process, I mostly worked on writing the code in backend, modifying views.py and models.py. In addition to this, I also helped Wendy on having the IP camera work by making sure it fetches and downloads the captured image.
  2. My progress is mostly on schedule, with some need to get started soon on investigating communication between webapp and RPi. I will spend more time after interim demo next week on the integration and webapp and RPi.
  3. Next week, I expect to spend some time on integration of webapp and RPi, and work on building the physical parts since we have most of our components ready (except for the motor at this moment).

Team Status Report for 11/04

  1. After pivoting our design for the motor and eraser system, we expect a better performance for the screw motor because the movement mechanics is no longer significantly affected by the weight and friction exerted on the wheel. And as we start to work on the RPi and camera part, we notice some potential risks about the camera. It is an IP camera that can work under the same WIFI as the web app, and at current stage we are only able to obtain the JPEG format of the image captured through the camera by setting the camera and our laptop at the same WIFI (we have not deployed yet). Since we potentially won’t guarantee that things work the same once we deploy the web app, we see there’s some risk that could jeopardize the success of image capturing. To solve this issue, we investigated how the IP camera works and noticed the image is uploaded to the website provided by the company that sells the camera. We could look for potential APIs from the website or look into downloading the images from the website if our webapp cannot exist in the same WIFI environment with the camera.
  2. This week, we are working on writing code and exploring how to control camera and motor, etc. There is no major change in the design of the system. One change we are expecting would be that we want to add some protect around the screw rod and motor after our Ethics discussion because we feel the need to lower the safety concern as much as possible.
  3. Schedule change: we’ve moved camera to this week since it is part of the webapp backend code. Due to this change, we’re postponing the usability test for other webapp features.

Jiayi’s Status Report for 10/28

  1. This week I mostly worked on meeting with my teammates and TA/Prof. to make an update to the physical part design to ensure it’s more reliable. We’ve made a quite big change to pivot from the previous mechanical design of moving the wheels horizontally to using a screw motor so that its movement won’t be heavily affected by the friction between the board and erasers. I also worked on writing and discussing ethics assignment with my teammates and working on the webapp development.
  2. My progress is a little behind schedule because we plan to get started with building the physical parts but now we have an updated plan. I will work more on webapp development and integration this weekend to leave more time for physical parts assembling next week.
  3. We plan to start our first iteration of building the physical part of erasing and testing the motor control code out and revising the implementation based on testing result.

Jiayi’s Status Report for 10/21

In the past two weeks, I mostly worked on revising the design with my teammates and working on the web app backend. In addition to the design report, I’ve also worked with Wenqi to design the model to use in our database.

My progress is on schedule as there’s nothing planned for fall break and I got some time to catch up with the pace of web app development. This week I also started putting the code together with Wenqi. In addition, our team has ordered components and is getting ready to assemble the parts together once they arrive next week.

So our primary deliverables to complete next week would be to put the communication between the backend and frontend together and build the physical components together.

Weekly question:

As we’re getting started on planning the actual physical parts, I’ve searched online in detail with my teammates to look for different types of motors, slider rails, shafts, and mounting components. In addition, I’ve also started looking into how webapp can communicate with RPi.

Jiayi’s Satus Report for 10/7

This week we mostly worked on the design presentation. In addition, I also spent some time reading the feedback thoroughly to understand what parts we are missing in our design to work on the design revision. In addition, I’m working on the webapp backend development. After setting up he framework, I’m spending time to start the coding on backend by building the general structure on interface with frontend, temporary interface with RPi.

I’m mostly on track to the schedule, and I will need to keep the pace on schedule by investing more time on the backend development.

Currently we’re mostly working on the basic logics of how information flows, but the mechanism for voting and for professors to decide which board to erase could be more complicated, so I will spend more time next week to get a decent amount of work done on the “voting + erasing” logic done.