The most significant risk right now is parts lead time. Purchasing opened after the proposal presentations, so this week we finalized our parts list and we plan to submit the order early next week. Nearly all of the hardware work depends on the Jetson arriving, so a late delivery would push back setup, camera capture, and integration together. Fall break is already marked as slack on our schedule, so a delay of a week or two can be absorbed.
If the Jetson does take a while, we can keep moving by prototyping on a laptop. One of us has a Windows laptop with an NVIDIA GPU, so the detection pipeline and the application logic can be built and tested there in the meantime, and it also gives us a machine to fine tune the plate model on later. The code carries over, but the environment does not entirely. The Jetson runs a different processor architecture, so the builds and installed libraries are different, and models have to be converted on the board itself. Speed and memory also behave differently, since the laptop is much faster and its graphics memory is separate from system memory, while the Jetson shares one pool between the two. So anything we measure about timing, memory, or scheduling still has to be measured on the Jetson.
The second risk is getting permission to record at a campus gym, since we need real footage to check that detection works from our camera angles and to build a test set later. We started that request this week and will send it early next week. If it does not come through, we can record at another gym with permission, and we can still test most of the logic on a mock setup.
The third risk is that the pretrained detector does not know what a weight plate is. The model we plan to start from covers people, backpacks, handbags, and bottles, but plates are not one of its classes, so the bench check will need training on our own labeled images. We are treating that as likely rather than optional, and the time to collect and label those images is already in our schedule.
No changes were made to the design this week. The three checks, the timing targets, and the hardware plan are the same as what we presented. No changes to the schedule either.
Outside of the technical work, we set up how we work together. We created a shared GitHub repository holding our proposal, slides, course guidance, and design notes, and turned on branch protection so nothing goes onto the main branch directly. We review each other’s work through pull requests instead, which already helped catch a few things in the proposal before we submitted it. We also presented the proposal on Monday and completed peer reviews on Monday and Wednesday.