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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.

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Jake’s Status Report 2/21

This week I developed the preliminary code to get the esp8266 to connect to wifi as well as the code to alter esp8266’s mac address as needed. I registered one esp8266 with cmu-device and received a confirmed connection. I then connected our esp8266 to AWS-Core.

Initial Connection of esp8266 to CMI-DEVICE

So far I am ahead of schedule as this week we have the potential to implement a working embedded device to software interface with a deployed sensor communicating to our web server.

In terms of deliverables for the coming week I would like to integrate the AWS-Core page with our deployed AWS website server. This is slightly complicated because I don’t believe we have a deployed website quite yet.

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Angela’s Status Report 2/19

This week, I was unable to do much as I was lacking AWS access. However, I was able to more carefully plan out the front end as well as design a rough UI on Figma for our web application.

I think a big problem with designing the UI was knowing what information we want to portray to the user and how much information we can gather from the sensors.

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Team Status Report for 2/12

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.

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Angela’s Status Report for 2/12

This week I worked on setting up a Github and buying EC2 instances for AWS. We also had our project proposal presentations which I worked on as well.  My current progress is on schedule, as we won’t have to focus on the front end for a while. For the next week, I hope to finish hashing out most of the backend and figuring out the pipeline.

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Jake’s Status Report for 2/12

I conducted a lot of research into our use case, the seating situation in the UC, and gathered a few metrics that could be used to drive our requirements and began preliminary design around these. Primarily  I began to experiment with the PIR sensors for occupancy detection. I determined area of detection and explored feasible deployment techniques. We will likely focus our sensors directly downward from underneath the table. As most sensors we are looking at have a cone of detection < 120 degrees this ensures we can detect occupancy at any direction around the table with a single sensors as well as ignore the noise of passing students.  I additionally started playing with code for linking our microcontrollers to the web.

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Ryan’s Status Report for 2/12

This week, I was unfortunately a bit under the weather and spent time recovering. However, I still helped prepare our proposal presentation, along with getting to hear a bunch of other really cool proposals. Outside of class, I spent time looking into sensors to purchase for the hardware solution, and found a couple thermal sensors that seem like they may work, as part of an effort to order all the hardware needed for the project. I also looked into alternative methods of charging the battery, including using solar panels, but found practicality issues with those which makes me hesitant to implement them into our design. While I am a bit behind on that, and am hoping to finish that up by early next week, I am feeling better and am hopeful that I can catch up! Next week, along with getting the rest of the parts ordered, I am going to start playing around with some of the parts we already have available.