Category: Gabriella’s Status Reports

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week I began working on testing. I did many trials to test the outfit generation speed, as well as functionality of all the features I worked on. I also met up with my team to do some integration testing of the entire system.

I added the disliking outfit feature that was suggested during our interim demo. Here is a picture of the new dislike button. This button stores the information of the outfit and saves the outfit to a table called outfit dislikes in the database. This table saves the ids for both the top and bottom of the outfit (or just the top if the outfit is a dress) as well as the number of times the outfit has been disliked. The number of dislikes that each outfit gets, as well as user preferences are both incorporated into the outfits that are generated for users.

I also added a delete button in our item editing drop down in the closet page. I thought it would help to make our application more robust, if users choose to get rid of certain items or if they mistakenly added a bad image and wanted to take a new one. This deletes the item from the database and s3.

I added a privacy notice table in the database as well as a privacy notice on the front end. The table keeps track of whether the user has accepted the notice or not. The privacy notice will appear in the app until users accept it. If the user tries to submit without accepting it an error will appear, so that users cannot use the app without acknowledging the notice.

I also began working on the poster assignment. I added the Product Pitch sections, and added some images of the application using the mockupphone website to make the screenshots look more professional.

For the final report, I wrote my first draft of pseudocode for the outfit generation algorithm. I want to make this as clear as possible, so I will be updating the pseudocode more next week based on feedback.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

My progress is on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This next week, I hope to finish the final report, poster, and video. I also want to make some final updates to the application, like creating a better error message for when the user does not have enough clothing to create an outfit for their request, and fixing the outfit dropdown in the closet to have the correct current number of uses instead of always having 0.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

I made many changes to the project this past week.

First, I set up the functionality for getting images from S3. I started by creating an AWS role with permissions for accessing the private S3 bucket with sensitive user data (images of clothing). I also installed the Boto3 module for S3. I used this module on the backend to fetch images from the S3 bucket, and create signed urls that I sent to the frontend. These signed urls allow us to display the clothing images on the frontend to users in a secure way. I tested this feature by uploading some test clothing images to the bucket and using different features of the application that show images.

I also fully reworked the outfit generation algorithm on the backend. I worked with Alanis to develop a more clear definition of what a “correctly” generated outfit would be based on different user requests. For example, for a casual request in a warm location, the new algorithm always generates a top/bottom or one piece (dress/jumper) outfit. It will never return a jacket or sweater. I also updated the algorithm to take user preferences into account 20% of the time.

I updated the select outfit feature on the backend and frontend to be compatible with dresses, jackets, and overwear (overwear in our application is defined as any sweaters, cardigans, blazers, or hoodies). I also got rid of the athletic usage type from the backend and frontend logic as it made more sense for the ML model to identify clothing as casual/formal instead of athletic, casual, or formal.

Alanis added the changes for the new closet inventory page on the frontend, and I added the backend functionality to paginate through the clothing items in the closet as well as edit clothing item classifications on the database.

I added a new location field to the database settings table, and made it possible for users to update their location from the frontend in settings. If the user inputs invalid locations or an invalid number for “Number of uses before dirty”, I added an error popup so users know that their change did not go through.

I also updated the backend to send the image url given by the Jetson Nano with the clothing item to the database table. Additionally, on the frontend, I updated the outfit generation page to display the clothing items in different formats based on how many items are in the outfit. This change was made for outfits to be more clear to the user.

This week I also ran into many issues with merging on git, and discovered that this entire semester I had been committing backend code under my name instead of my github accounts. This caused a majority of my commits, besides my newer ones to not show up in contributor insights. I now have this fixed for my future changes, but it is still inaccurate for my past ones, so for accurate insights into my backend code changes, please look through the individual commits under my name or github account instead of the contributor insights.

Overall, this week I finished all of my goals for the backend/frontend and have tested all of my features for basic functionality. I also set up a testing plan for more specific insights like intuitiveness of the application and the speed of outfit generation. I also added my testing information to the final presentation.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

My progress is on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This next week, I hope to finish up all of my testing and start working on the final report, poster, and video.

As you’ve designed, implemented and debugged your project, what new tools or new knowledge did you find it necessary to learn to be able to accomplish these tasks? What learning strategies did you use to acquire this new knowledge?

I had to learn how to use FastAPI to set up the backend. I learned this by reading through the documentation online and following a tutorial. I also learned how to use Flutter to develop the frontend, which I also learned by following a tutorial and reading documentation.

I followed both tutorials for FastAPI and Flutter during the beginning of the semester and documented my experience doing this in previous status reports. I felt that getting an initial exposure through the tutorials was very effective for me, as I was able to get a basic grasp of the frameworks. I also found it helpful to look up documentation later on as I had more specific goals and features I wanted to implement.

I learned how to create, manage, and query a MySQL database in a class I am taking this semester, 70455 Data Management Fundamentals. I feel that this class helped me get a thorough understanding of how to set up and use the database securely and effectively.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week, I worked on a few different changes for the backend/frontend and began to prepare for testing.

I added API routes for the do laundry feature and select outfit feature. These link to functions in the backend that will update the database with information about how many times an item has been used, and what kind of outfits user’s like to wear.

I worked with Alanis to test the uses until dirty feature, and made a few changes together to complete the feature.

I also worked with Riley to help him set up the communication between the Jetson and database. I helped him plan out the overall framework of how it would work, with him sending a POST request from the Jetson, and writing a function in the backend to parse the Jetson information into data that can be added to the database. I also wrote out steps on how to use FastAPI to test the parsing, and I wrote the API route for the POST request along with pseudocode with the format needed to add the data to the database.

I linked the backend functionality to the frontend for updating user preferences and item usage.

I also wrote another function in the backend to add a new item to the closet_inventory table in the database, and added more clothing to the database and images folder for testing.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I changed the priorities of some tasks with the demo coming up, and prioritized helping to link the Jetson to the backend, along with adding more clothing items to the database over making the final updates to the outfit generation algorithm as the current one is not ideal but does work.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I want to update the outfit generation algorithm.

Verification Tests:

I tested the accuracy of the backend by going to all of the API endpoints and making sure they produced the expected results, based on different requests. I also tested query accuracy by ensuring the responses from the database reflected the user’s wardrobe accuracy accurately. I also tested error handling for invalid API requests, and requests to the backend for information in the database without database credentials.

For verification of the database I want to confirm data consistency and reliability. This includes making sure classified items are parsed and stored into the database correctly, images are referenced accurately through the proper file paths, and wear counts update as expected when laundry is performed or outfits are selected. I also want to do testing for the consistency of selecting outfits, so that the update for user preferences and usage both get committed together or neither get committed when there are errors.

Finally, for verification of the frontend I will ensure that the frontend successfully interacts with the backend and displays data accurately. This will include testing user actions like generating outfits, and toggling laundry. These features will also be tested for speed with a goal of successfully triggering within 2 seconds. Additionally, the frontend will be tested for robustness under different scenarios such as failed API calls and situations with invalid data being given or returned. This should lead to clear feedback to users instead of crashing.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week, I worked on setting up the reinforcement learning for our outfit generation.

I added functions to our backend that will reset the number of times an outfit has been used when users do their laundry. I also added a function that will increase the number of uses in the user_preferences table for clothing color preferences. Both of these should be triggered when users select an outfit in the frontend.

I had some issues with the frontend not working this week as well, and had to debug and install Visual Studio.

Besides this, I wrote a script to create queries for adding all of the new color pair entries to the user_preferences table. The table now has all 91 entries. Here are a few.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the proiect schedule?

I am on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I want to link the new functionalities to the front end and make my final updates to the outfit generation algorithm.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week, I added a few new features to the frontend application.

I reworked the frontend again to include a new page for the generate outfit feature, instead of displaying a popup on the main page. This new page still displays the dropdown for selecting an outfit type, but also allows users to generate as many outfits as they want and select their favorite. I also added displaying the outfit images to this page. Here is an example of a generated outfit in the new page. This works by selecting the outfit type, and then submitting that request to the backend which returned a generated outfit along with the imageUrls for the top and bottom. The application then displays images of the outfit based on the imageUrls pointing to the files in the server.

Aside from this, I also added the new user_preferences table to the database. The image linked displays the table structure, along with the color pair I currently have added.

The application now is now linked to images on the server, the backend, and the database.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the proiect schedule?

I am on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I would like to add all of the color entries in the user_preferences table. I also want to update the table from the frontend based on the outfits that users choose. I also would like to finalize the outfit generation algorithm. If I have extra time, I would like to add some more dummy testing data.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week, I worked on my ethics assignment and different frontend components.

I reworked the frontend to use a stateful widget instead of a stateless widget after reading this article. I made this decision because we will want to save information about the generated outfit on our page.

I also added functionality to the generate outfit button on our frontend. Clicking this button now brings up a popup with a dropdown. I used this tutorial for adding the dropdown. Users can select their outfit type from this dropdown, and when they click submit it displays the generated outfit details on the main page. I used this tutorial for making http requests on Flutter. This image shows the generated outfit details, generated by our algorithm using this sample data in our database. Eventually, we will want to display this on a separate page where users can either continue generating outfits or select their outfit. Our application frontend is now linked to the backend and database.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the proiect schedule?

I am on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I hope to start displaying the clothing item images on the frontend. If I have extra time, I would like to start working on adding a new table for user preferences in our database, and possibly updating the current outfit generation algorithm to take this into account.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week, I mainly worked on the backend and database. I created the database on my local computer, and set up the inventory table based on the schema we created. I used this tutorial to make the database accessible by remote users. Then, I added some sample data to the database from the MySQL command line. I also set up a python virtual environment and downloaded FastAPI and python-mysql-connector to it on AFS. I then wrote simple backend code for the outfit generation and pushed it to our github. This takes in user requests and returns a top and bottom that matches the request based on what is in the database. I may need to update this algorithm to be more robust later on, as we are currently running into issues with how we want to approach outfit usage and outfit generation, so I will wait for that to be figured out before making more changes. Here are the test results from requesting a casual warm weather outfit.

I also presented the Design Review this week, and began working on the Design Report.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the proiect schedule?

I am on schedule, as I just completed setting up the backend and database code. It is possible that I will need to adjust this code later though, depending on if we can get the usage field working or if we end up needing to change our approach. If that happens, I will update the schedule to include time for more backend changes.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to finish the design report, and begin working on the barebones web app UI.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week I worked on doing more research to ensure that MySQL would be the best database for our use case, and I looked into options of how to interact with the database from the Flutter front end.

This past week during one of the Capstone meetings, other options like hosting the database on the Cloud came up and so I looked into using Firebase instead for our database as it integrates well with Flutter and natively handles its scaling and security. Ultimately I came to the same conclusion that hosting our database on a server locally would be ideal, as Firebase is very convenient but it is also a NoSQL database which limits the queries we can use and it can also be expensive for scaling.

After officially coming to the conclusion that MySQL would be ideal for the project, I began planning out the database and decided on creating two tables, one with closet information and one for premade outfits. I then designed the table schema for the closet info table. I also set up MySQL on my computer and tested out running queries from the command line cli. Additionally, while planning out the schema, I discovered a potential issue with storing our clothing images directly in the database as it would lead to performance issues and a much larger database size. I looked into other options and decided it would be best to using a file storage system to hold the images and store the file path in the database instead. I feel that AWS S3 would be ideal for this because of its great scalability, availability and performance.

From here, I started looking into different options for interacting with the database from the front end. I mainly looked into using the HTTP Rest API, fastAPI, and using direct MySQL from Flutter. Ultimately I decided to go with fastAPI as it handles requests efficiently and works quickly because of its asynchronous capabilities. HTTP Rest API did not seem ideal because it can be difficult to scale and has performance limitation with high concurrency. Direct MySQL was also not the best choice for us because it has security vulnerability risks and was not good for scalability.

Then, I wrote up some simple fastAPI code to interact with a mySQL database based on this tutorial to get a better understanding of how I could get it to work for our application.

Besides this, I worked on the slides for the design presentation and have been practicing since I’m presenting this week.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the proiect schedule?

I had to update the schedule again to add connecting the web app to S3 and backend as a new task. I also am prioritizing fully setting up the database and backend over the UI of the web app as all of us will need to be able to use the database. Based on these new updates, I am on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to complete setting up the database and backend, or at least get very far in doing so. I also want to finish up the design report.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours)

This week I contributed to the project proposal presentation slides. I also did some more research on the database plan for holding the clothing items and their classification information.

I am more confident in our choice of using MySQL as it accommodates concurrency well (both the Jetson Nano and the Flutter app would be accessing it), and it is more scalable which would be ideal for having multiple users with the app as the project grows.

Additionally, I completed the setup of Android Studios and Flutter to prepare for working on the application. Originally we were planning to make the application for IOS, but while setting everything up I found out you can only develop IOS apps on a Mac so I am now creating an Android app that will be cross platform and work on IOS. I completed this tutorial to get used to working with Flutter as I have never used it before. Here is a demo of the app I made using the tutorial and an android emulator.

I have not begun working on the Figma mockup yet as originally planned, as instead we have prioritized finishing the functionality of the app before adjusting the style/look. Although we aren’t setting up the UI yet, I did look into some design ideas for later. This and this are the design concepts I am thinking of using for developing the app’s frontend.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

We are reordering the schedule, to prioritize getting our app working first and then making it pretty/working more on the front-end design later. Based on this new ordering, I am on schedule!

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I am planning on creating the design presentation slides. I also am hoping to set up the Github repo for the application and I want to get started on setting up the database.