We had our project proposal on Wednesday, which Jake presented for. Beyond working on the presentation, we also submitted order requests for hardware parts; 2 potential Esp8266s, and a D6T thermal sensor. In addition, we looked into a bunch of different sensor options, and also looked into solar panels as an alternative means of battery charging. Finally, we set up the software portion, including starting up a Github repo and requesting AWS services.
Right now, the main risk we are facing is not being able to detect people with our combination of sensors. Although we are planning on only using a button to indicate occupancy for MVP which is not at risk of failing, we understand that this isn’t an ideal solution for our use case, and that we’d want to be able to update occupancy status without relying on a user to remember to press a button when they sit down and get up to leave. To try to mitigate this risk, we are already ordering sensors to try to give us ample time to set up and test them. Another risk we are facing is that we may not be able to meet the 55-hour battery requirement that we are setting. We would like for the battery to last 55 hours so that it can operate from 9-8pm Monday through Friday (which we identified to be the peak hours on the 2nd floor of the UC) and then charge over the weekend, but we realize that finding a battery with that large of a capacity and then managing it strategically enough to last a week is a tall task. We have looked into alternative methods of charging, such as solar power, although we are skeptical of how practical these methods may be, so we might have to reframe and change our use case to accommodate this.
Since we are fresh off our project proposal and haven’t done too much deeper design thought and testing yet, we have not yet made any major changes to the design of the system or the schedule. But with the design review on the horizon, expect changes to come!
One exciting point of progress has been integrating a PIR sensor with our Arduino! Although we haven’t done too much work with using the sensor to detect occupancy yet, it is definitely exciting to see everything start to come together.
