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Shize’s Status Report Mar 25th

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).

I discussed ethics related issues with the team and participated the in class activities for ethics. I also continued to work on the PCB and firmware and couldn’t make significant progress. I’m now looking into alternative solution that uses a less complicated hardware that involves using Adafruit Arduino feather board. Saniya and I are also seeking help from the professors in embedded systems. I will order a feather board next week and hope it reduces the difficulty of firmware development significantly.

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

My progress is behind. I will order a feather board next week and hope it reduces the difficulty of firmware development significantly.

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

Get started on developing the hardware using Arduino feather.

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Team Status Report for March 25

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?

PCB Development:

Based on discussions with the Professor & TA after receiving our Design Review feedback, we realised there may be more challenges surrounding custom PCB development than we had previously planned for. We had originally planned on using the STMWB Nucleo board we are currently using for testing and development as a point of reference for our PCB design, however we have realised this is not sufficient to ensure seamless integration with our selected peripherals. To address this we have completed additional research on the specs of our STMWB processor and are currently prioritising drafting & manufacturing an initial design so we can start testing.

BLE Connectivity:

Whilst working on initial development & testing STMWB Nucleo board , we have discovered that the integrated BLE module is not always reliable / is more challenging to work with than we initially thought. To address this issue we are looking more in-depthly at documentation & integrating external crystals. As a last resort back-up option we have also looked at replacing our microcontroller with an Adafruit feather.

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?

At this point in time we have not made any overall changes to the structure of our system, however as previously mentioned we have had to work on updating the schematics proposed in our design review .

Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.

As mentioned above, we have slightly moved around our proposed schedule to ensure we have ample time to refine our PCB design.  Our goal is to have a draft of our design as soon as possible to account for time and cost expenditures if several rounds of prototyping are required.

Additionally, during early March all of our group members were preoccupied with external commitments (phD visits, conference, other project due dates etc.) so we did not have much time to progress on our capstone work. Whilst we did initially plan for these shortcomings, we are still slightly more behind than projected and have had to adjust our workload to accomodate this.

Please enumerate how you have adjusted your team work assignments to fill in gaps related to either new design challenges or team shortfalls.

Saniya has swapped from working in between the software / hardware tasks, to primarily focus on PCB design to assist Shize. As a key part of our project is effectively miniaturising our system whilst balancing other design constraints, our group believes it is vital to direct our time/resources to this aspect of the project.

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Madi’s Status Report for March 25

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

1 – Focusing on Improving IOS dev skills

As I have started working more on the application I have come across gaps in my knowledge about IOS development, particularly my understanding of the  Swift language (I last used swift before college!!) and the mechanisms of the frameworks itself. At the start of the semester I had hoped that previous experience with Web application and Andriod dev would be enough to learn ios however I decided this week to quickly go through a Udemy Workshop to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Whilst taking an in-depth course may be time consuming, my previous experience with learning new software/languages has revealed that I tend to save time in the long run by building a solid foundation of knowledge. Specifically, this week I focused on functionalities that will be central to our application like navigation control & communication between view controllers, working with CoreData, interfacing with a user’s camera & photo library (for LCD screen designs) and user gesture controls.

2 – Starting to look at Device Enclosure Design

In addition to my work on the application I have started to generate a few rough sketches of potential ideas for our physical jewellery component. Using exisiting products and conceptual jewellery designs as a reference I designed several potential earring cuffs (wearable would hook around the back/top cartilage of the ear) as well as drop earrings (hardware embedded in a pendant style fixture that would hand from the ear). I have included a couple of examples in the team report.

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

Unfortunately, I am quite behind in terms of my intended progress due to external commitments I had that did not finish until last week, and roadblocks during the application development process. Beginning this week I have been putting in extra hours to try and get back on schedule and will continue to prioritise capstone over the coming weeks. This weekend I am really focusing on  improving my IOS dev skills and believe based on my current progress that I will be in a position to continue working on our project by Monday. Moving forward I plan on setting small incremental goals for software application.

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

By the end of next week I hope to have a functional implementation of all the views planned for the application. I am planning to just focus on getting the layout and basic function of all the UI elements & screens completed before integrating the design system I worked on in previous weeks

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Saniya’s Status Report for March 25

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This past week I worked more on the PCB. Since we were hitting some roadblocks with being able to program the STM32WB, I did some research on my own and tried generating projects through ST softwares such as STM32CubeIDE and CubeMX. I was still having no luck with these, so I brought our board to my Embedded OH, where a TA was able to help me get the board working using the Zephyr development environment. We were also able to test sending a simple Bluetooth packet that was received over iOS and an existing STM app that lets you view wireless data transfers from ST devices. I spent a few hours running samples and will be bringing Shize up to speed on what I worked on with the TA.

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

We are a bit behind schedule due to the issues we were having with configuring the board, but now that those have been amended, I plan to spend time with Shize this week hashing out our hardware code. Using Zephyr seems to be far less complicated, so I don’t think it will take too long if we work together.

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

In the next week, I hope to have all the base code for the hardware finished and if that is done, then I can get the PCB design ready for fabrication.

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Shize’s Status Report for March 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).

I worked on driving the LED matrix using the nucleo but couldn’t get the GPIOs to work correctly. I think this might be due to the incorrect HAL library files I downloaded from GitHub. Right now I’m debugging the problem and checking the compatibility of GitHub code. Because of the trouble I encountered working with nucleo, I also made alternative plan. I watched the BLE demonstration on Arduino feather and found that very simple. I think in the worst case scenario we can switch to using an Arduino feather and use that to drive the LED matrix.

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

My progress is behind. I’m contacting ST to ask for help using their library.

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

I hope to finish the PCB design by next week.

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Madi’s Status Report for March 11

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

In the week leading up to break I focused on completing the design report. Specifically I worked on the scheduling/task division and fleshing out the architecture, system implementation and design trade studies for the mobile interface application. This involved doing further research into Apple’s CoreBluetooth Framework and determining a generalised system architecture for the application. In addition to this, I completed the design trade study and system implementation for the device enclosure. I also started drafting some initial designs.

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

I did not have much opportunity to make progress on the project over the past couple of weeks due to midterms and commitments over spring break. However, I had accounted for having less time in the first couple of weeks of March earlier in the semester and plan to set aside a large amount of time to make progress in the coming weeks.

 

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

This week I hope to have more sketches of the device enclosure completed, as well as the model classes for the application finalised. If I have additional time I plan on working on creating customised views for the application

 

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Saniya’s Status Report for March 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).

In the week preceding spring break, I spent some time working with my team on our Design Report. During break, I spent a significant amount of time working on the library for LED matrix. I attempted to integrate my work with the HAL library Shize compiled on our Github and was unsuccessful.

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

My progress is a bit behind schedule due to the inability to coordinate efficiently and work collaboratively over break on the code for the device. This coming week, I will spend time working with Shize in person to see if we can hopefully debug our issues, and if that fails, we will create an alternative plan to implement our device using Adafruit extension boards.

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

In the next week, I hope to debug the interface we’ve created with the STM HAL library and help Shize in completing the PCB design.