What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
The primary concern (which we mentioned in the previous report) is still the PCB design. To address this concern further, we have multiple people on the team now working with Fusion 360 to create schematics and board layouts, as well as writing preliminary circuit plans. Another concern is the BLE connection to the device: since our microcontrollers arrived at the beginning of the week, we were able to start working with them and familiarize ourselves with how the device I/O works with BLE. Due to this, the concern around connectivity is generally less but we will see how the iOS development end of the process will go.
Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?
There are a few small changes made to the design of our system, mostly in the approach we were taking to the hardware design. Upon starting this project, we conceptualized our hardware design process in a way that would require a lot more time to create our own low-level functions to interact with the matrix, in the way we have learned to interact with peripherals in our classwork. However, this would be a lot more time-intensive than is necessary, and would make it more difficult for us to move much beyond our MVP. Going forward, we want to spend more hardware design time rese arching and utilizing the multitude of resources to interact with our parts and create a better device for the user. After understanding better how to the STM microelectronics libraries with the Adafruit libraries, we will create an updated block diagram.
Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.
Our initial Gantt chart had us starting hardware design for the LCD immediately after the LED matrix; we have modified that to ensure that we complete our MVP fully first, with working wireless communication and designs, before moving on to the more complicated LCD implementation.
Please enumerate how you have adjusted your team work assignments to fill in gaps related to either new design challenges or team shortfalls.
Our team work assignments have not changed drastically from the roles we initially defined. Due to midterms, we all had less time this week to work on our tasks, but have rearranged the approach to hardware designing by splitting up the process in a slightly different way. We initially were planning to collaboratively work through the design and coding, but have now split it so that Shize will focus on the base set up of STM32 and I will focus on the peripherals, currently interacting with the LED matrix. Going forward, we will continue to make adjustments to more effectively take on the design of our system.