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Team Status Report for 12/9

This week, all the team members worked together to complete the overall system test with 3 instructors and test the performance of the system a few more times with different speeds to figure out the speed that’s most stable to be used during the final demo. Since we have completed all the design and build of our system, the most significant risk at the current stage would be unexpected damage to the physical components. Therefore, we would be particularly careful during the testing and ensure the motor is not overheated and the current and voltage supplied would not exceed the corresponding value on the data sheets that damage our motor driver or motor.
There has been no change made to the design of our system during the past week.

The unit tests we have carried out include latency tests for both erasing and image capturing, the user test of the website, and the power consumption test. In addition to that, we have completed the overall system test with 3 instructors and 3 students. From the latency test, we found the time taken for erasing a 30’’x 15’’ area of board takes 50s and the captured image should be displayed in 1.3s. From the power consumption test, we found that the peak power of our entire system is 50.65W. From the user test of the website, we have identified several confusing elements and the lack of instructions on the website, so we have modified the nav bar as well as added different instructions for both students and instructors on their home pages. From the overall system test, we have received feedback that the latency of the erasing board is a bit too large. For this reason, we are still exploring the peak speed our system can achieve while ensuring its stability. Other than that, we have also received feedback from Prof. Yu and Prof. Mukherjee that there are some glares in the images, so we will also find an optimized location to place the camera by adjusting its relative height to the board to avoid this issue.

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Wendy’s Status Report for 12/9

This week, the main focus of our team is to complete the rest of the testing as well as prepare for the final demo and final report. We have tested the entire system a few more times to ensure the communications between RPi and the web application are stable, and the connection with the camera is stable. Moreover, we improved the code so that the motor is enabled only when the erase function is triggered to reduce the noise produced by the motor. After that, we tested the current system with three instructors, and despite 2 of them reporting there is some non-negligible latency in the erasing process, all of them agreed that the rest of the functionalities seem useful and they would prefer using the system in a classroom setting. In addition to that, I have also fixed some minor issues in the backend of the web application such as making sure the storing paths of images for different classes are different and throttling the erase function to ensure the button is not accidentally clicked too many times within a short period of time.

Since we have completed all the goals we have set for the MVP, we are currently on schedule. For the next week, we plan to demonstrate our system during the final demo on Monday and complete the final video and report after that.

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Xiaoyu’s Status Report for 12/9

This week, our team worked together and integrated the whole system, ensuring all communications between different components are working correctly. We now have achieved our MVP. We also spent some time doing user testing and other tests. We also completed the final poster and are starting to write the final report.

We are currently on schedule. Before the final demo, we will finish our last tests on cleanness and latency of erasing. After that, we will also be finishing up the final video and final report.

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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.
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Wendy’s Status Report for 12/2

This week, the focus of our team is to finish building the mechanical part of the system and continue the testing process. Currently, our team has completed wiring the motors and combined all attachments on the board. The motor on the screw rod works well and RPi can interface with the web application. Moreover, after we received the DRV8825 motor driver and tested it out with our NEMA 17 motor, we found that the speed of erasing also improved. After testing the latency of erasing and maximum power consumption together, we also spent some time together completing the slides for the final presentation and recording a video for it.

Individually, I have also conducted the web application usability testing with one professor and one student, and they both gave the feedback that the website is succinct and not hard to use. However, the professor mentioned that it would be great if there could be a instruction to help users get familiarized with every functionality and the nav bar can be more clear, so I will also work on that and add this to our website.

Based on our schedule, I’m mostly on schedule except that we are still recruiting more participants for our final functionality testing. We will try to reach out to more professors and students and get it done before next Wednesday. I will also polish the user interface of our website based on feedback. Moreover, if I have extra time, I will also spend some time investigating how to the web application with Canvas so instructors do not need to manually enter the student ID (which is a post-mvp goal).

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Xiaoyu’s Status Report for 12/2

This week, my teammates and I worked together and finished assembling the system. We tested the erasing functionality and decided the best distance and pressure for the slider rails. Also, we ordered a new type of motor driver, drv8825, in our attempts to boost the motor’s max speed. It turns out to work pretty well, doubling the speed of the motor. Our team also worked on the final presentation and a short demo video together. Here is a picture of our fully assembled system.

Currently we are on schedule. Next week, we plan to finish overall testing of the entire system, as well as the final poster, video and report.

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Xiaoyu’s Status Report for 11/18

This week, Jiayi and I are working on communication between RPi and web application. We followed guidance from the internet and wrote some code. Currently it is not working, but we will work on it tomorrow to fix it. Also, as a team, we ordered wood pieces and started to assemble parts together, Now we assembled supporting structure of whiteboard, whiteboard itself and upper slider rail together, and we have concrete plans for the rest of the system.

Currently we are mostly on schedule. However, due to shipping error, we received a new motor that does not fit into our system. Considering we don’t have much time left, in order to stay on schedule, we decided to first build the system with the old motor, which is slower than we expected. Aside from that, our progress meet our schedule.

Our deliverables will be to finish communication between website and RPi and assembling mechanical system tomorrow, and spend some time before or after Thanksgiving to test the entire system.

Attached is some code for RPi-webapp communication that we are still working on.