Sam Adams’s Status Report for 2/22/20

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?


This week I focused on finalizing the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) that we will be using for communication over Wifi. I was able to settle on a simplified version of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Using some code I had written previously I was able to write a very basic python program to mimic the protocol I decided to design.

Some of these decisions that were made are outlined here.

I also spent a lot of time meeting with my team in order to finalize the APIs. We also spent a lot of time making general design decisions concerning the layout of our system.

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 now seems to be on schedule again. Looking on the Gantt Chart I am right on schedule in terms of the design and I was hoping to get ahead on the implementation of the UDP protocol over WiFi. Even though I haven’t started the final implementation of this protocol on the MCU, I was able to write a preliminary test protocol that will be very useful down the road when implementing this protocol.

Looking forward into next week, a lot of my time will be put into creating the final design doc for the project. I think this will end up putting me a little bit behind schedule so I might have to do some overtime next weekend in order to stay caught up on the implementation stage. I feel that getting a prototype done early will be huge for the parts that I am working on as I’m guessing that optimization will be the most time intensive part.

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


Next week I will be focusing on getting the design document finalized and completed. This will include the consideration of any criticism that we received during the design presentation.

I also want to start playing around with the MCUs that were shipped in this week to see if we can get some basic communication going.

Sam Adams’s Status Report 2/15/2020

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?


This week I mainly focused on defining the parameters for the UDP protocol. I had already decided to write a TCP implementation over UDP but I used this week to look deeper into the specifics of the protocol. I looked through some libraries that others had written to see they satisfied what I was looking for, but I determined that the best approach would be for me to write my own protocol from scratch to allow for maximum customization and optimization. In order to write this protocol from scratch I spent a lot of time reviewing my code and notes from 18-447 (Introduction to Computer Networks) where I worked on very similar protocols that I will be implementing later. This took up a majority of my time.

The second thing I worked on this week was researching the software structure of the drivers. I was able to find the source code for drivers running on both the Hercules RM36 MCU and the Watchdog MSP430FR5994. This allowed me to start planning how we were going to implement the serial protocols (especially i2c).

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


I hoped I would have been able to define all of the parameters for the TCP over UDP but I wasn’t able to fully do that. In order to catch up I hope to spend some time before our team meets in lab on Monday to fully define the UDP protocol.

I had hoped to start implementation of the i2c drivers this week. Even though that did not happen I believe that we made significant enough progress to get some real work done next week as I was able to define a starting point for the implementation of the serial communication protocols.

Even though I am not as far along as I’d hoped to be, I am a lot more confident going forward. Coming into this week I was very lost on what I should be doing to accomplish our goals but after this week I feel much better about things going forward.

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


Next week I hope to be able to write an initial testing routine along with a basic UDP protocol. I also hope to be able to start creating a simple test for the i2c driver protocol on both the Hercules and the Watchdog. I believe that establishing these workspaces for both the UDP and the i2c protocol will be paramount to our success in the future.