Category: Nataniel Arocho-Nieves’ Status Reports

This week was spent finishing the final presentation slides as well as preparing for the final presentation. I also spent some time putting finishing touches on the NodeMCU side of the project.

Next week will be focused on finishing the last 4 deliverables – the final poster, final presentation, final video, and final demo.

Overall I am confident in our abilities to complete these deliverables on time, as we are basically wrapped up with the technical portion of our project.

This week (and last week), was spent integrating Ian F’s NodeMCU code (the code responsible for detecting people w/ the IR sensor) with my own code (sending POST Requests to update server), in addition to debugging / refining the code. Another major task completed was the setup code for the NodeMCU. Before, Users would have to flash each NodeMCU and give it an individual ID. Now, during the setup, the NodeMCU sends a post request to the server, and is given a unique ID in return. After this the NodeMCU is connected to the server and runs as normal. This is very useful on the users end, as now users do not have to flash each NodeMCU when setting up.

I would say our team is definitely on track; We are done with pretty much every major aspect of our project, so I am confident about our final slides and presentation in the coming week.

Next week will be mostly spent refining our project in addition to the presentation.

This week was spent working on refining the NodeMCU code, as well as spending time w/ Ian F. understanding his code so we can integrate it at some point later in the future.

As we enter the verification and validation phase of our project, I have multiple tests and methods to ensure that my code functions properly. I do this by writing the code correctly so that it works as intended.

I would say our progress in on schedule, I don’t see any issues getting in the way of our final product.

Next week will be spent integrating Ian F. code w/ my own and hopefully have a working prototype.

This week was spent getting the NodeMCU to communicate with the web server by sending a JSON via a POST Request. We successfully got this working earlier today; The work on my end accomplished was: registering the NodeMCU’s MAC Address on CMU-DEVICE so it can communicate with our webserver (this required writing simple arduino code to get the NodeMCU’s MAC Address), in addition to finalizing the code that sends the POST request to the webserver.

I would say our progress in on schedule for the interim demo; Our team will meet tomorrow to finalize our progress for the interim demo, we will also look into implementing communication via sockets for the interim demo. Overall I am confident in our team’s ability to be ready to present on Monday.

Next week will be spent improving our current framework from the interim demo. If the IR Sensor has not yet been integrated into the project by the time of the demo we will start work on that next week.

This week was spent refining the NodeMCU code written last week, as well as testing the code with the web server. It would have been nice to have two days of lab to work on the project; its a shame our Wednesday had to be spent at the riveting ethics lecture.

I would say our progress is still on schedule, maybe slightly behind. I currently don’t have access to my ADHD medications due to the shortage so work is a lot harder to complete now, hopefully next week will be less frustrating.

Next week it is critical we spend time working on this project so we can make sufficient progress in time for the interim demo. Hopefully I get access to my medication sometime in the coming week; Doing work without them is near impossible for me.

This week was critical for getting work done for our project. While I wish I could have spent more time working on our individual tasks in the project, a good amount of time was spent working on the Ethics assignment. Despite this I personally made a lot of progress on my end. I wrote up code to be ran on the NodeMCU; This code is responsible for sending a POST request to the web server, this will be our main form of sending data from the NodeMCU to the web server. I used this tutorial (https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp8266-nodemcu-http-get-post-arduino/) to assist me in designing the code.

I would say our progress in currently on schedule. I still need to test the NodeMCU code with the web server, but I plan on doing this Saturday when our team meets to complete step 3 of the ethics assignment.

Next week it is critical that we spend some time out during the week working during the project, as we our missing one class for the Ethics lecture. Meeting Saturday will mitigate some of this work but it is important we stay on schedule so development isn’t hindered too much.

This week was mostly spent working on the Design Report. This assignment ended up being a much larger task than our team anticipated for; As such most of our time this week was spent working on said Design Report. I also planned on starting the NodeMCU development, however since the parts arrived very late into the week I was unable to start development before the start of Spring Break.

I would say my progress is currently still behind schedule. The NodeMCU arriving so late into the week definitely contributed to this, as did the Design Report taking a significant amount of our time.

Next week it is critical that development for the NodeMCU begins, getting a simple prototype working shouldn’t take too long, after that is completed I will immediately get to work on developing the code to be used in our system.

After establishing our set of sub-systems for our design report, we realized using a Raspberry Pi to host our web server may not be ideal for our project. To account for this we shifted our project to use an EC2 Instance instead of a Raspberry Pi.

This week was a bit slower compared to other weeks in the course so far. The only big deliverable that we had to have completed for this week was our Design Presentation, which I think went quite well. I also planned on spending some time this week ordering the NodeMCU so I can get development started with that.

I would say my progress currently is a little behind schedule. This week was quite busy for me; I spent most of my time this week doing work for the classes that are important to me. Due to that I did not order the NodeMCU during the week, however the good news is I ordered it as I am typing this report.

Next week I plan on working on a simple NodeMCU prototype to understand developing for the device; I plan on getting this done before Spring Break. If the NodeMCU does not arrive before then that fine too, as I’m sure I can spend some time during break working on the project to stay on schedule.

Recreating our schedule last week was critical, this allowed us to counter the design challenges associated with changing projects weeks into the course.

 

A lot of this week was spent reading documentation and looking at sample projects using NodeMCU/ESP8266 boards. I did this to have a basic understanding of how our microcontroller would be implemented in our project. I also did this to have a general idea of how developing for these microcontrollers would look like. I also spent time working on our Design Presentation slides, especially the slides that involve my portion of the project,

I would say our progress is still behind schedule, as is to be expected  since we restarted our project last week. However I am confident in our ability to complete this project based on our work this week.

As for next week, we plan to complete the Design Report and order some microcontrollers so I can begin my development.

There is no particular course that aided in my portion of our design. Instead, my experience developing with microcontrollers came from my job as a research assistant for Dr. Yang Cai. My work consisted of developing code to be used on an ESP32 microcontroller that would communicate with an Unreal Engine project running on a VR headset.