Team Progress
After the Design Review presentation on Monday, our team worked on the Design Report and on preparing for the hardware’s arrival. Ankita planned the firmware implementation and explained how our firmware choices support continuous recording, clip preservation, and transfer to the phone. Clarence sourced the remaining parts we need for integration, including connectors, switches, buttons, and breadboards. He also arranged access to a 3D printer for the enclosure and began learning CAD. Jayden made the phone app more robust against failures the real board could cause. Interrupted downloads now resume, each clip is checked before the device is allowed to delete it, and the app now validates the network being used.
Risk Mitigation
The main risk is still the arrival of the ESP32-S3, since sustained recording and recording during a transfer can only be measured on the real board. To prepare, Ankita is reviewing the camera, microphone, PSRAM, and SD card interfaces and writing initialization code so testing can start immediately. Her first goals are to confirm memory and storage, capture a JPEG, and check the microphone before building the full recording pipeline. Dropped frames from SD card write delays or Wi-Fi activity remain a concern, and we plan to address them with buffering and by batching SD writes. On the app side, we updated our mock device to behave like the ESP32, so connection problems surface during development instead of at integration.
Changes
There were no changes to our requirements or hardware this week. The app now downloads each clip as a series of small chunks, so an interrupted transfer only has to redo the chunk it was on. This fits within our existing communication protocol, but the firmware will need to handle many small requests reliably. We also plan to replace the shared development Wi-Fi password with a separate password for each device, so one user cannot connect to another user’s hat.