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Team Status Report for 10/7

This week, our team has spent a great amount of time working on finalizing the details for our first components ordering. While we worked on this, we realized some potential risks that could be more dangerous to our deliverables. This includes mostly the assembly of the physical board + eraser + wheel + rail + RPi. We need to ensure that the following aspects don’t fail:

  • the power source should have enough voltage to support the motor, linear actuator, and RPi.
  • the components aren’t too heavy to make the board not balanced.
  • the communication between PRi and our web server should be generalized, and this part is the one that we haven’t addressed enough in our meeting this week and we decide to worry about the hardware parts for now and invest more time on RPi and web server integration after fall break based on our schedule.

For the first two components, we’ve searched for potential physical components that could give enough voltage while has a light weight. And we’ve successfully found the components and added it to our budget list. However, the rail we decided to spend some time exploring the 3D printing options as there isn’t a rail online that fits well to the wheel we found. Besides this, we currently don’t have major changes in our system spec. Due to the change, there is a slight decrease in our cost, but we will still need to check if we need to spend any money on the 3D printing.

Since the change is in system spec instead of how we design the process, there is no update on the schedule. Below is our current budget form.

To answer this week’s question, we’ve applied the following principles of engineering, science, and mathematics:

  • during the solution formulation, we prioritized the approach that gives the most general capability while being of great familiarity to most group members. Therefore, we’ve utilized our knowledge in software engineering so that we could use the Django framework to manage the backend of our web app with access to relational DB that stores relevant information about the student’s “voting” mechanism in our project.
  • We’ve also considered various types of motors and control systems with our background in embedded system engineering and decided to use stepper motors to have better control over the precision of movement.
  • We also applied our knowledge in electrical engineering to come up with potential solutions to wire the components together so that we could reduce the cost of power sources by buying fewer batteries while supplying the voltage to more components.
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Jiayi’s Status Report for 9/30

This week I mostly communicated with my teammates to ensure we addressed the feedback from the last presentation in our new design presentation. We had discussions on updating the use case requirements slightly to focus more on the use of whiteboard erasers instead of mentioning too much about reducing chalk dust so that our goal focuses on reducing human effort and allowing instructors to more easily decide on which part of the board to erase. Since I was not at school this entire week, I met with my teammates remotely to talk about our design presentations.

My progress in setting up the website is a little behind schedule due to my traveling out of town for the entire week. To make sure I don’t fall behind the schedule too much, I will take extra time next week to complete the task of setting up the website together with my teammate.

In addition to setting up the website, I will work on building the basic parts of the backend for our website part of the project, collaborating with my teammate who mostly focuses on the front end.

In the past three years, I’ve taken a course in web application development, which could help me work on the web app part of the project. During my distributed systems class, I’ve also gained some experience in understanding communication through the internet. In addition, I’ve taken computer security, which could help me identify and prevent potential security issues in our website. For the hardware section of the project, my teammate Xiaoyu gives us background in controlling motors, and we meet together to explore potential solutions by searching from the internet.

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Jiayi’s Status Report for 9/23

This week, we spent most of the time on the proposal presentation. In addition to the presentation, I met with my two other teammates to note down more details on our design and what components are required. We plan to discuss with our TA on Monday to request some components from the ECE inventory and order other components by the 9/27 deadline.

In addition to the budget plan and proposal presentation, I plan to start working on figuring out the backend setup for the website part of our project in order to keep myself on schedule.

I hope to set up the basic backend Django framework by the end of next week so that by then we can proceed to try enriching the functionality of both the backend and frontend together.