Category: Jiayi’s Weekly Reports

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.