This week Ryan and I focused on performing a further examination of the the power consumption of each component of our hardware. Using an ammeter we found the thermal sensor, PIR and esp8266’s current draw under reading and wifi uploading, as well as under DeepSleep and light sleep. We also attempted to monitor current draw through a typical detection and upload cycle by using the oscilloscope to grab voltage off of a resistor leading into the entire circuit however this effort was unsuccessful as we tried using a tiny resistor so we could use our original power supply while still allowing every component to be in its operating window. The data we got on the oscope was far too noisy to draw any conclusions from.
For our verification and testing of the front end for capacity ( i.e how many people are website could support) I utilized an industry testing platform called Load View which is a cloud based load tester that essentially creates a simulation of however many concurrent users you want and creates load stress for your website.
This is a common industry testing method taught in Jeff Epinger’s web app class called “Web Page Load Testing.” Within our application, the EC2’s point of stress is in responding to the XML requests sent out by users browsers asking for the latest data on table occupancy. What Load View provides for us is the ability to easily create a set of browsers concurrently that all have our website open and are all sending these XML requests.
As our original use-case requirement was that we wanted to support 25 users we ran a stepped load where we gradually built up to 25 websites open in browser to see how load times would react. Our apache2 instance of our Django server running on an EC2 performed well we had 100% success on each test and load times even under max capacity remained under 2 seconds which is satisfactory for our user experience.
This upcoming week we plan to do a trial demo on wednesday and tweak occupancy detection code but beyond that we are on schedule for having everything finished this week.