Wendy’s Status Report for 10/07

This week, our team finished our design presentation and received a lot of feedback on our design from the class and instructors. As a group, we met and rewrote our list of orders and submitted forms to request the parts of our revised design. After the presentation and discussion, we have a clearer idea of what our solution would look like, and how each part would interact. Personally, I have also refined my prototypes for the frontend of the web application, and completed implementing the skeleton of each HTML page, for both student view and professor view. Therefore, I would like to say my progress and our team’s progress are on schedule, and will try to get as much as we can done before the fall break.

In the following week, before integrating with the backend functionalities, I will start writing CSS for the website to make the website more aesthetic and easy to navigate. I will also employ my knowledge in responsive web design to make sure the website can be generalized to both tablets and laptops, so students can access it on different devices and professors can integrate it into classroom tablets.

Wendy’s Status Report for 9/30

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.

Wendy’s Status Report for 9/23

Last week, I spent the majority of my time and effort refining our MVP and preparing for the proposal presentation slides. After receiving the feedback from the professor that we should minimize the time takes to do the physical construction and make the MVP more achievable, we redefined our MVP to be a motor-driven board eraser that can be controlled by a web application with only erasing and image capture functionalities, and decided to implement the student “voting” feature if we have more time. Personally, I also spent several hours preparing for the proposal presentation.

We have also divided our work of researching required parts of our system by looking up them in ECE inventory and Amazon to find the parts that can fit well with each other and make a budget plan. We have summarized that information in this spreadsheet. Therefore, my progress and the team’s progress are currently on schedule.

In the next week, I should complete the design presentation slides with my teammates, as well as start prototyping and building the front-end interface of the web application of our system on my own.