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Madi’s Status Report for Feb 11

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours). 

The primary objective for me this week was to conduct research and work on the initial stages of planning our project. 

During the front end of the week, I focused on assisting with scheduling and task division, user/market research and developing the physical design and iOS application use case requirements for the proposal presentation. I communicated with my team members to develop a list of tasks and rough scheduling timeline to create a Gantt Chart. I attempted to segment our project as much as possible into smaller, achievable goals.

To accurately understand the design requirements for the outer casing/physical component of our project, I started by surveying the market of existing products. This involved gathering data from e-commerce sites associated with the consumer habits of our proposed market regarding earring size, material, type and backings. Information was compiled into a spreadsheet to enable us to develop realistic design constraints. Additionally, I conducted further research into safety guidelines for skin safe wearable materials, thermal ranges for parts in contact with skin, jewellery weight limits and design factors that can lead to dangerous conditions for consumers (i.e. ear infections, scarring , tearing etc). 

I also worked on developing the solutions approach for the iOS application. I looked at several different development avenues, including developing a cross platform application using React, or working with a combination of Apple’s UIKit. Due to our limited time and scope for this project, ultimately SwiftUI was chosen due to its higher compatibility for iOS 16 and better support for user interface development. I also looked into the APIS & libraries we could potentially use to interface with our wearable (CoreBlueTooth & CoreData). After determining an appropriate solutions approach, to gain a.  I looked over documentation and tutorials on the apple developer website as well as some existing projects for BLE communication on GitHub.

After the presentation, whilst our group waits for hardware parts I took the opportunity to start planning the user interface for our application. This has involved analysing existing mobile applications for smart home devices and lights, wearables and other bluetooth devices. This enabled me to gain a better understanding of the layouts, user flows and components that will provide an optimal user experience. Additionally I started working on a design system in figma (colour scheme, typography, component design and graphic elements). I also created a preliminary user flow diagram and started working on low fidelity wireframes. 

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule? 

According to the Gantt chart I am currently on schedule. 

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

By the end of next week I hope to have all planning for the software completely done and to have possibly started working on some of the front end. I also hope to work with my other group members to have finalised a few options for the physical design of our earring.

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Saniya’s Status Report for Feb 11

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours). 

During this week, I focused my time on two objectives: preparing the proposal presentation and handling the parts for our project. After submitting the presentation material last Sunday, I prepared during the week leading up to the presentation on Wednesday. To prepare, I familiarized myself with all the concerns relating to the execution of our project and researched our implementation strategies to better be able to answer any questions that were asked of me.

After the presentation, I was able to submit our parts for order and I began going through the datasheets for each of the major components (primarily the microcontroller and the two screens: the LED matrix and the LCD).  I also began familiarizing myself with the frameworks for connectivity protocols in iOS and researching other projects using the Swift Core Bluetooth (BLE) framework. Additionally, while waiting for the parts to arrive, I began researching manufacturing options for the physical casing of the earring and the electrical components. I’ve looked into SLA printing for some of the internal structure compoments, since the material options for SLA printing are far less heavy and heat conductive, and metal 3D printing (ideally 316L stainless surgical-grade steel) manufacturing companies. Finally, I read up on the specific capabilities of DotStar LEDs. We were intially thinking to build our MVP with a NeoPixel LED matrix component, but after some searching, we found the form factor of the DotStar LED matrix we selected better suited our interests. Dotstars have much faster data rates than NeoPixels, which expands our pattern options to involve movement.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?  

According to the plan set out in our Gantt chart, I am currently on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

In the next week, I hope to begin developing preliminary hardware designs (block diagrams, drawings preceding CAD for the earring casing) while waiting on the parts to arrive.  Once the parts arrive, I intend to start building test circuits immediately and learning to invoke basic functionalities in isolated testing.