It is safe to say that the week before the break was a tough one for our team. Little to no progress was made on the overall project and our design report was quite poor and deficient. Consequently, we must pick up the pace individually and as a team in order to catch up with our schedule and deliver on the product we set out to do.
Having said this, some things remain constant in our design and therefore on the list of tasks we must perform for next week. Our sensor module remained unchanged from what was presented in our design report. Therefore, immediate and individual testing of our sensors and NodeMcu should take place given that the parts have already arrived at the equipment desk. with this in mind we will move to integrate these two components as soon as possible and test them together prior to interfacing them with our software stack.
Speaking of our software stack, this subsystem underwent significant modifications as part of the design report. Such changes that will affect the overall schedule as well as the communication with our sensor module subsystem. While redacting our report we had discussions about the communication between the sensor module, the backend portion and ultimately the web application we intend to develop. As a result of this discussion, we realized that the inclusion of the Raspberry Pi in our design was unnecessary and therefore added an extra layer of complexity and delay to our system. As a result, we estimate that this change will not only improve our system but also provide some much needed leeway for us to catch up and meet the goals of our overall product.
The changes to the Software Stack include changing from hosting on the RPi to EC2 as EC2 provides a reliable uptime for the web app, as well as more security for hosting over the RPi. We realized we did not have much justification for the RPi, and that an EC2 instance running Ubuntu 20.04 would work better. Additionally, the database that we used changes from SQLite to MySQL, as MySQL provides a scaleable database for the webapp and is more robust, which SQLite lacks.
With this design modification in mind, the biggest changes to the schedule involve removing the portion with the Raspberry Pi and replacing it with our new solution involving the EC2 instance and the components underneath it.
To complete this project we have identified some tools that are new and must be learned like EC2 and other AWS resources, as well as other ones which require refreshers and improved knowledge about, like possibly CAD and 3D printing software, and definitely Arduino and some of its libraries. These tools will be used individually for the most part. However, the group must actively asses and verify throughout the process that these tools are appropriate. This involves making sure that they are not too difficult to use and that the individual member responsible for them is up to the task. If we encounter that a particular tool is too difficult, we will work collectively with it or perhaps remove it in favor of a simpler one. These decisions will be made on a subsystem basis since we envision that some tools are less complex and require less knowledge than others.
Next week, we plan on working with the sensor and nodeMCU once they arrive, as well as the Ethics assignment due Wednesday as a deliverable. Overall, we are slightly behind schedule, but plan to catch up during this week as soon as we receive our parts.