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Xiaoyu’s Status Report for 10/07

This week I gave the design presentation on Wednesday.As a inexperienced presenter, I spent much time preparing for it. Although the presentation did not go very smoothly, but I give it my best try. We just received feedback from Task today and I am considering them as we prepare our design report. Our team also finished submitting all our order forms and now we are just waiting for things to arrive.

My progress is currently on schedule. Recent weeks I am waiting for components to arrive and have less work planned on schedule. Next week I will be starting to write RPi code for motors and solenoids. My plan is to have some compilable code before the components arrive.  Also, I will be working with my group members on our design report next week.

 

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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.

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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.

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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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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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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.

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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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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.

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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.