Our team prepared for the design review this week. We focused on reviewing all the feedback from our proposal presentation last week, and examined the technical details of our system. Our main goal was to order some parts as soon as possible. Kanvi ordered the building blocks of the hardware spot modules excluding the covering. We will cover this once we have assembled the parts together. Beyond that the rest of our week focused on specificity. This included settling on the HC-SR04 sensors, the ESP8266 (hardware), MQTT, MongoDB, Python and Javascript (software). Based on feedback, we made changes to our system requirements from the operator’s perspective. We used cost, setup time as the overarching factor in determining the hardware components considering the project’s scalability as opposed to technical impressions. For example, we figured that we could build entire spot modules for as low as 15$ with Wi-fi capability so why consider LoraWaN. Our biggest risk right now is being able to obtain 95% promised accuracy in car detection based on our detection algorithm and module arrangement. If our initial algorithm doesn’t provide great results, we would have to iterate quickly in considering improved solutions with minimal overhead.
your curbside parking buddy by Mrinmayee Mandal, Kanvi Shah, and Neville Chima for Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone, Spring 2022