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Team Status Report for April 8

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?

Our key concern for our project continues to be integrating the Bluetooth modules for the software and hardware portions of our project. As we are running behind schedule according to our Gantt Chart, we have been left with less time than previously planned for combing our work and testing the final product.

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? Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.

Whilst we have not made any major changes to our overall design, we have decided to prioritise working on our MVP LED Matrix Device. Previously we were working on both the LED Matrix and our stretch goal, the LCD Screen, in parallel, however as all of our group members have had a busy semester, we have collectively decided to focus on producing a single, functional final product.

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

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Madi’s Status Report for April 8

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week I continued to work on developing the mobile application for our project. Specifically I continued working on fleshing out the front end, focusing on mapping user interactions to data model updates and making custom components and views.

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

I had a couple of issues at the start of the week with getting my database migrations to work without corrupting my code. However I was able to make some good progress by putting in additional hours during the back end of the week. Whilst I am still slightly behind as mentioned in previous status reports, I believe I have been able to catch up over the past couple of weeks. Our group as  a whole has chosen to make some simplifications to our project by just focusing on achieving our MVP.

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

Over the next week I hope to start looking more closely at Core Bluetooth so I can make preparations for integration.

Now that you are entering into the verification and validation phase of your project, provide a comprehensive update on what tests you have you run or are planning to run.  In particular, how will you analyze the anticipated measured results to verify your contribution to the project meets the engineering design requirements or the use case requirements? 

  • Functionality Tests => Across the past couple of weeks I have tested the performance of the mobile application using XCode’s built in simulator. This has enabled me to test the mapping between my constructed view & view models, and the navigation/user flow of the application. As the simulator enables the application to be run on different phone screen sizes (iphone X, iphone 12, iphone 14 etc.), I have also tested the responsiveness of our application design to ensure our product is accessible to a broad demographic of users. Moreover I have created test functions and dummy models to ensure all database operations are working. Over the coming weeks I hope to simulate the application on my phone,.
  • UI/UX Tests => To test the usability of our applications at this point I plan to gain feedback from my teammates. As they have not been involved in the software side of the project, their insights will provide somewhat of an unbiased perspective in regards to the successful and disadvantageous aspects of the current design. Specifically to evaluate our Setup Time Use Case Requirement, I plan to ask them:
    • How easy it is to create a new design?
    • How legible the design/pattern editing controls are?
    • How intuitive are the bluetooth connection controls?
    • How informative is the information on the home-screen?
  • Bluetooth & Integration Tests => To evaluate our Setup time  and Update Speed  user requirements I plan to work with my teammates to test the how effectively we can send information to the LED Matrix.
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Saniya’s Status Report for April 1

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week I built the circuit with our RGB matrix and tested it first using basic Arduino demos. I also worked through some Bluetooth examples for the STM32WB using Zephyr, which is the software that my 349 TA showed us. I also spent a good amount of time laying out the basic schematic for our PCB using the Nucleo board’s design for reference. However, since the Nucleo board has far more subsystems and functionality than we require, I have had a little difficulty in understanding which sections of the power management circuitry I need to integrate into my design, and which of the many STLINK programming options I need to add. I hope to clear these questions up in our meeting with Professor Nace on Wednesday.

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

We were a bit behind schedule due to issues working with the STM board, but this week Shize and I will meet with Professor Nace to finalize our PCB design and try to get some basic patterns working with STM control.

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

This week I will work with Shize to make sure the circuit works properly with the STM32 and finish out the PCB design.

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Madi’s Status Report for April 1

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

After reviewing Swift and iOS Development last week, I was able to working on building a foundation for our mobile Application this week. Specifically I worked on defining the Data/Entity models for our CoreData database, as well as the  associated business logic and fetch/store functions. In addition to this I worked on setting up the screen and custom views for our application. This primarily involved blocking out the component/view layouts and sizes and working on navigation controls.

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

As mentioned last week I am slightly behind in term of the schedule initially defined on our Gantt Chart, however I feel as though I am starting to make better progress as I spend more time working with SwiftUI.

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

My plan is to finish getting the most simplified functional front end finished by early next week so I can have it integrated with the Data Layer before Friday. Then I hope to start working on developing the  UI/UX  –> i.e. customising widgets, integrating in the color/typography design system, adding in image & icon assets, refining gestures & user interaction etc.

 

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Team Status Report for April 1

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?

As we are slightly behind schedule in terms of both the hardware and mobile application development, currently our primary concerning is having enough time for testing and integration.

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? Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.

We have not made any major changes to our schedule or our design system this week.

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

Although we mentioned having issues with our Hardware design and PCB development in our last status report, we were able to make a breakthrough this week. Particularly we were able to meet with a Professor to work through a draft of our PCB board to fast-track manufacturing a prototype, and we able to successfully program our STMWB to communicate wth an iOS device via BLE. We are hoping this will reduce the time required for firmware development and allow Saniya to swap back over to assisting with iOS development

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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.