- What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
This week, we worked mostly on coming up with detailed hardware and software designs. As we were integrating the two and discussing with our mentors, we improved the design so that it is more fit for the purpose and target audience of our product. For example, we decided to leave out the accelerator and see if we meet our use case requirements first. There is always a possibility that we might not reach that and have us adjust the design to accommodate its usage.
Additionally, we all lack experience in actually building physical products. We expect difficulties during this process, so we made a CAD for general guidelines and solidified the design and dimensions.
- Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?
We decided on the board for our product: RPi 5 8GB. Although we thought about including an additional accelerator, we realized that our product does not require a heavy ML workload for us to need an accelerator. To keep our design cheap and simple, we decided to attempt our ML processing on just the RPi.
Our group also decided to include an app (we’re thinking about an on system app for now). This app is displayed on our LCD display to show the current session’s skin analysis as well as data stored from past user sessions.
Training on the whole image datasets proved difficult, with poor generalization. This causes a shift to training with close up skin-patched based methods. These have seen more success in published papers. This requires a higher resolution camera, however that is very much within specs. The newer models of Raspberry Pi-compatible cameras all have at least 12MP resolution, which is plenty for accurate skin patches. This does have the side effect of requiring the user to be closer to the mirror than previously projected, ~40cm. However this is still within standard desktop mirror distances. Fine-tuning was not in schedule for this week, so we’re still on track in that regards.
- Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.
We’re on track as we finalized our parts list and compiled a detailed implementation plan with block diagrams. We have also planned out our communication protocols for our device interface.