This week our team primarily worked individually and made some good progress on the the three components of our design: the sensor module, the microcontroller and the software stack.
In terms of the sensor module, we were able to overcome the obstacle presented by our delayed order for parts and initial testing was done with the IR sensors that provided an overview of its behavior and validated that the sensors we were able to obtain were operational. We got a feel of how the sensor works and how to integrate it with the NodeMcu later on. Some results were unexpected but further more rigorous testing for next week should clarify this. In addition, first steps were taken to integrate our sensor to the NodeMcu by researching Arduino code and libraries that will prove useful in our application.
The majority of the progress this week was made on the communication protocol between the NodeMcu and the Software Stack. Nat worked on setting up the nodeMCU which we received this week, as well as formatting the POST request to send data to the web app.
For the Software stack, we were able to host the web app on the EC2 instance on an Apache web server configured to our liking. This means two things: 1) We are able to visit the web app outside of locahost and 2) we are able to send POST requests to the web app. Also, we set up the MySQL DB that will be used with the web application.
As a result, the top two priorities for next week will be to continue our development on the sensor module with the ultimate aim of interfacing the sensors with our NodeMcu, and refine the communication between the NodeMcu and the stack so we can then bring it all together in order to obtain a working and functioning system to be presented in a couple of weeks as part of our interim demo.