Category: Zhichun Zhao’s Status Reports

This week I focused on building the circuit on the feet, and I think my progress is on track. This circuit is supposed to be able to detect pressure. Our team chose to accomplish this by building a pressure sensor, and I built a voltage divider with the sensor and a resistor. With the different amounts of pressure, the resistance of the pressure sensor will be changed, and by measuring the voltage in between the pressure sensor and the resistor, I will be able to get the amount of force applied to the pressure sensor.

My contribution to this project is the physical part of the vest and the circuit of the lower pressure system, I will analysts and evaluate them by seeing if they are functional.

For the next week, I plan to implement the code for the pressure sensor with Arduino, and I found an article online explaining a similar subject to this.

https://srituhobby.com/how-the-voltage-sensor-module-works-with-arduino/

This week I focused on the physical level of the project. I designed and built a wearable system with expandable straps and buckles that fit the accelerometers, the Arduino, and the power banks. I used the sewing machine along with the straps that I ordered at the beginning of the semester, but since the machine stopped working after the first 20 minutes of use, I had to sew the sensors on to the bands manually. This made the process more time-consuming and took longer than I expected. Fortunately, I completed the wearable part by the end of the week.

For the next week, I will start focusing on the tracking page as well as the demo with my teammates.

 

This week, I focused on two parts. The first part is the tracking page. Since I have not been coding for websites for a year now, I did some research on tutorials that can guide me to build a timer, and I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49f1cjZWRJA to be a good fit for what the tracking page needs. I also follow the django guide to set up the virtual environment and downloaded the newest version of django on my laptop, as now I am prepared to implement the actual timer. I hope to get a working timer next week for the tracking page.

The second part is the physical hardware. I am planning to sew the sensors onto the wearable fabrics during the lecture time on Monday. In order to do this, I went to Techspark on Sunday and learned how to use the sewing machine in the workshop. I also learned how to sew with needle and thread for more delicate or smaller parts of the sensor. I believe my skill is prepared to satisfy my teammates’ requirements and I will be able to complete the sewing process on Monday.

This week I focused on the Ethics Assignment. After reading the paragraphs that are posted, I gained a new understanding of what ethics in designing a capstone project is and what I can do to make sure my project stays ethical.  We also planned a meeting to further discuss the ethics in our project as a group.

On my own part of work, I am mostly confused when working on my own. Since I have not been working on a web development project since a year ago, much of the knowledge is forgotten and I am struggling to fulfill the demand of the group. I am not sure what I can do about the situation I am facing.

I plan to reach out on stack and see if there are any TA who is experienced in website development, and I will also dig deeper into the ethic of our project by listening to the lectures given next week.

This week I mainly focused on building the design review document. We held multiple team meetings together to discuss further details of the design, and we are becoming more explicit about our design goal.

Due to a personal medical accident, I was hospitalized and could not work during spring break, during which I planned to work on website development. I plan to reach out to the course staff and my group mates to see if we can adjust the schedule so I can catch up on my work. I am also concerned about the parts that we are still waiting on. I reached out to course staff and the receiving office of the ECE department and have not gotten any response yet.

This week, I focused on transforming the design idea that we came up with into a digital prototype on Figma. Since we want to make a mobile app to track the data, I chose an iPhone 14 Pro template as my design template. The figure that I attached below is an example of a software page. Since we are still unsure about the color scheme and style, I left the design in the simplest black-and-white form. I am currently on track this week, and my plan for next week is to start in learning the basics of mobile app development.