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Team Status Report for 9/30

This week the biggest challenge and risk we faced is reconsidering our use case for the project. Previously our use case consideration are very wide and not in depth, so we really struggled coming up with quantified requirements and tests. We are managing this risk by having discussions with professors and refining our use case before the design presentation.

The major design of our project does not change much. However, we are planning to rephrase our use case to make it more clear, as feedbacks have shown that our use case is somewhat confusing.

About schedule changes, Jiayi and Wenqi are planning to postpone setting up frontend and backend of the web app to next week, because they are out of town this week.

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Xiaoyu’s Status Report for 9/30

This week our group is working on several things: revising our use case, making component orders and making the design proposal. Our group had some in depth discussion about the use case of our project, after receiving many feedbacks from TAs and professors. Personally, I also spend some time looking for appropriate hardware components that would fit our project, and I am ready to justify my choices in the design proposal. I have also received RPi borrowed from ECE Inventory, and is starting to learn how to use it.

Next week, I will be giving the design presentation. Our group will be revising our design after we receives feedbacks, and will be writing the design report together. I also plan to spend some time getting familiar with RPi, which we already borrowed from ECE Inventory.

In response to the discussion, I think 18-349 Intro to Embedded Systems is particularly helpful to this project. In that course I did a project that can rotate a motor to a certain position using PID control, which is related to how we plan to move the erasers across the board in this project. Also, the skills I learned when I work on learning how to use the Nucleo board from scratch would definitely help me setting up Raspberry Pi for this project.

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Xiaoyu’s Status Report for 9/23

This week our group is working together on the proposal presentation. We prepared the presentation slides together. After the presentation we also spend some time considering and discussing the feedbacks and questions we get after the presentation. We decided that our proposal is mostly reasonable and does not need major changes, and spend some time on the details of our designs.

We also spend some time on preparing the list of components we need to order. As I have taken Embedded Systems, I was looking for stepper motor. After discussing with our team, we have also decided to replace the robot arm with solenoids, as they both serve the same functions but solenoids are much simpler.  I spent some time reading data sheet and looking up information about solenoid online before making the decision. Here is a link to our list of components:

Currently our group is on schedule.

Next week, we plan to get components ordered by Wednesday. Our team will also be working on the design presentation throughout the week.

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Team Status Report for 9/23

Currently, the most significant challenge we expect is building our system on the whiteboard. We are worried that the parts we bought might not fit well with each other. We are also concerned that the system might not work as we expected in physical aspects. To solve this problem, we are actively looking for different variations of parts to use as backup plans.

After discussion with the professor and our TA, we decided to keep our design of the system as the feedback indicated to us the current proposal mostly meets the use case requirements. However, we did spend some more time creating a detailed sheet on the budget of our important components. 

Our schedule currently remains the same as specified in the proposal. Further changes might be made after we meet with our professor and TA next week.

Our project involves the importance of public welfare. More specifically, we should consider the educational factor because the primary goal of our project is to help the professors and students with erasing boards and notetaking during lectures. Therefore, we will need to consider their needs more thoroughly while designing the functionalities, so our project can contribute more in the aspects of education and public welfare.