Angela’s Status Report 4/30
The beginning of this week, I mainly focused on preparing for our final presentation. Past that, I was able to get a fully working website with the features as described in the presentation. I kept the demo layout with “4 tables” even though we are switching the layout around, because ultimately it will act as 4 separate tables.
In terms of user testing, I first went around a small group of people with the front end first, while changing the sqlite file to emulate occupational changes. They suggested labeling the different areas even if the area is labeled on the tab to the side just for further convenience.
For future development, I will convert this to a mobile friendly version as well as planning to conduct user tests in the UC with the actual sensors before the final report.
Angela’s Status Report 4/23
This week, I was able to re-design our front-end as well as figure out the mobile vs. desktop versions. Here is a prelim screenshop of the desktop design: 
and it zooms in and out a lot better than before. This is already implemented and included in the final website.
I was able to change the theme and improve the mapping a lot more while maintaining the integrity of the sensors.
The mobile version would look more like this: 
which is more of a mockup but not hard to implement for this week.
We are also, as a group, making sure our final presentation is sound before Monday, including all our last minute changes.
Angela’s Status Report 4/16
This week, I was in direct contact with someone who tested positive, so I was not able to make it to class, as well as still feeling extremely sick. However, I was able to get frontend work done. The main feature I was able to get working was the zoom on the map. This includes being able to zoom out enough to see different sections in the full map as well as zoom in to individual tables.
Next week, I hope to finish all features of the frontend as well as helping out with hardware testing and load/stress testing. The features would include having different tabs for different sections and refining the proportions so that the website would look as planned on all phones.
Right now, I want the web app displayed on a desktop/laptop to look like this:
while the mobile app looks the same. Currently, I’m using responsive web design (responding to different screen sizes/media) in order to accomplish this.
Team Status Report 3/27
Our team had to focus more on the ethics assignment that was released to be due on Monday as well as the lecture on Wednesday. As a team, we’ve been trying to integrate our individual work, which didn’t happen last week as we had hoped. Because of this pushback, we will have to focus much more on connecting the pipelines between software and hardware as well as make sure our individual products still work as intended.
With the ethics assignment, we were also presented with other topics to think about in regards to our project, which would be more on the user side of this project. How would we prevent people from using our data for ill-intent (aka knowing the number of students in the UC at a time)? What would we do about people who don’t want their data collected in terms of occupancy? These are definitely problems we should confront.
Since we are behind schedule, we hope to catch up a lot more in class the following week as well as make sure software and hardware form a pipeline.
Angela’s Status Report 3/26
This week, I spent the first half working mostly on the ethics assignment. However, due to illness related difficulties, I was unable to make it to the ethics lecture on Wednesday. From the rundown I got from my groupmates, I was able to agree with their proposed ethical concerns on our project, which was mostly centered around the user’s privacy as well as potential use cases that are outside of our planned use-case scenarios. This would include having a person with ill intent planning to use the number of students in the UC for non-intended purposes. Users also cannot opt out of having their occupancy tracked, even if it’s anonymous.
I also made advancements with developing with Django. Currently, I have the web app set up on my local machine with skeletal code, using a python virtual environment.
Angela’s Status Report 3/19
This week, I was feeling really sick up until Friday night and was unable to stay up enough to make significant progress. However, I was able to finalize plans for frontend to make it a little bit more accessible and streamlined.
Next plans are to fully integrate Django and MySQL with AWS and finish the integration process.
Team Status Report 2/26
This week, we presented our design review and are currently awaiting feedback. We did not make any changes to the system, only more detailed analyses of the frontend and hardware.
Through our preparation for the design review and report, we did not discover any new significant risks yet. Overall, we are just trying to properly manage costs and size for the hardware in order to support the 55 hour battery life as well as making sure software structure can hold up to the number of tables it has to support. Currently, our biggest power consumption device is the PIR sensor, which will, after 55 hrs, consume 85% of the available power consumption. As a contingency plan in case the battery does not last, we are planning to lower the active time of the PIR sensor, such that the thermal sensor does the initial occupancy sensing and the PIR sensor is then used to confirm occupancy.
Angela’s Status Report 2/26
The beginning of this week was mostly spent on the design review and the design review report. The AWS credits were not rewarded until later in the week, so I used some time to review the hardware aspects of the project, since I am more software focused. I also made very minor changes to the first panel of the UI. This was just to show the baseline statistics of the area of the UC that’s displayed.
Now that I have access to the AWS credits, I should be able to start connecting a Django app to a MySQL database. I also want to finalize the UI and study more on how to make the UI more aesthetically pleasing and accessible. Currently, my progress is on schedule, as I have plenty of time to develop this UI. I hope to show a more refined UI as well as show that I have done AWS work.
Team Status Report 2/19
This week we did a lot of prep work for getting started on building. We were able to get some power consumption analysis going as well as further part analysis. For AWS, we were able to get AWS IOT working and connecting our esp8266 to AWS core. We also spent a good portion of the week planning our design presentation. In terms of front end, we got a simple UI going that displays needed information on the occupancy status in the UC. We have some ongoing conversations for storing information from our sensors and how we should identify each table, but that is not a significant risk.
The biggest risk so far is still regarding the sensors. However, after doing some power consumption analyses, we discovered that we would have to do a bit more design changes to the hardware in order to account for the battery lasting 55 hours. This didn’t necessarily change the costs, but we did have a more in depth conversation of what parts we actually need to support this current load. We also discovered that there need not be a big change on our existing schedule, and we are moving forward at a good pace.