Posted on

Lee’s Status Report for 2/25/2023

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).

This past week, I worked with my group to refine our design review presentation slides. Some of the changes we made to my initial slides were about the testing and verification section. I initially had descriptions of the unit tests we would conduct and any additional information that would need to be stated would be conveyed verbally (I did this since we were given the suggestion last time to have less text). After discussion with my group, we opted to follow the format provided in the design review template which asked us to describe the inputs and outputs of our test and how it was relevant to the quantitative design requirements. Since this was quantitative it stood to reason that so should these test cases.

Additionally, during the the week I contributed to submit design review peer forms during scheduled class times.

Lastly, I researched what part to order for the phone mount that would attach to the laptop. I had to make sure the phone mount wouldn’t be magnetic since I didn’t like the idea of attaching a phone mount permanently to the laptop via an adhesive strip on both devices. I opted to go for a clamp option since it would leave no trace and it wouldn’t be attached when our product was not in use. Furthermore, I went to find a design on Amazon that had a 180 degree rotation so that the phone could swivel and point at a 45 degree downward towards the piano layout.

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

Our project is on schedule. We recently adjusted it to account for the change in project, but since by the end of this week we have mainly figured out which exact components we want to order most of what it left is then continuing on to work on our individual parts. For me, that is working on the CV component and I have already done so preliminary research into the functionality and example code for OpenCV so I can familiarize myself with it’s syntax. I took Computer Vision 16-385 and even though we did not use OpenCV, the fundamentals of what the built-in functions do were certainly taught and some of which we even implemented on our own.

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

By the end of the next week, I hope to have OpenCV package installed on my laptop and have done additional research on the application towards a piano layout. Also looking to research for some sort of preliminary basic code for objection detection for finger-tips.

Posted on

Lee’s Status Report for 2/18/2023

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).

Over the past week, I worked with my group and speaking with Tamal and Professor Sullivan regarding our project change to our new idea of our AR piano. I expressed many concerns and thoughts about the new project idea which gave us the necessary ability to address many of the caveats that came along with this change. Lastly, I helped take the information discussed in a google doc which was divided up into sections in the abstract to creating a rough draft of the slideshow presentation for the design review.  Here are some example slides below of my work:

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

Due to changing our project idea, our progress is a bit behind. We worked this week to ensure that our design idea was fleshed out and thorough to get back to the same pace as the design from our original idea. Because our idea is more simple and has less complexity, it also means there will be less confusion amongst group members as well as a more cohesive design review presentation.

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

For the next week, I plan on working on the peer review forms for the presentations next week. I am also eager to await for the feedback on our design review presentation so we can also make the necessary changes to our project too before we dig ourselves a hole we cannot get out of. In the meantime, I also plan on working on my side of the Gantt scheduling for my part of the project.

Please list the particular ECE courses (if any) that covered the engineering science and mathematics principles your team used to develop your design ? If there are no courses please tells us how you learned those principles over the last week ?

For our project, the courses 16-385 (Computer vision), 18-220 (Circuits), 18-349 (Embedded Systems) covered the main science and mathematical concepts and principles for our design.

Posted on

Lee’s Status Report for 2/11/2023

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).

This past week for this project, I worked on  developing the intitial rough draft slideshow of our project proposal demonstration. Here are some example slides below: 

Later on, I worked with my group to refine these slides so that they would be ready for the presentation for Monday and Wednesday. For Monday’s and Wednesday’s class I also worked on doing peer reviews for my other classmate’s proposal presentations.

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

Our progress might be a bit behind as we would like to order parts as soon as possible (preparing for design review presentation might be of higher importance depending on unknown variables). Therefore, the first course of action will be to ensure that all of our design details are fully fleshed out, specified, and finalized.

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

Our deliverables I hope to complete in the next week is to make the necessary modifications provided from the feedback of our proposal presentation and use that to create a design that will not only be suitable and well-established for our design review presentation but also to begin ordering parts for our project since the lead time on that could very well be longer than expected.

Posted on

Team Status Report for 2/11/2023

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?

Some of the risks are that some of the components we want to use in our design may align well with our use case requirements. As an example, for our coin battery, it may not supply the 2 year length of time we have for our use case requirement. It also may perform differently depending on the use of the coin battery, which could make results unpredictable. We’ll try to manage this risk by being very thorough with our research when analyzing datasheets.

Another risk that could pose complications would be having ill-equipped foresight of how our solution approach may not take into account well of envisioning every stage of where the product ends up affected by. We should analyze how our product would perform when being checked in, on the conveyer belt, being loaded onto the airplane, being picked up at baggage claim, etc. To manage this risk, we plan on creating block diagrams like we did for our theivery flow slide in order to illustrate and demonstrate how this would work. By planning out every minute detail, we increase the chances of a successful project.

Lastly, we might want to consider the risks of how practical our product would be for consumers in real life. This also means looking into whether there are some forms of data communication that may be better than others such as bluetooth or wifi. Some contingency plans we thought of in order to address these risks is writing out some of the pros and cons to both. We discussed how wifi had security issues or that not every user connected to the airport wifi, but bluetooth also had a shorter range than wifi as well.

Another practical risk was addressing multiple passengers who would go through the scanner or a family of passengers and their luggages, and how we would adress our solution approach to address these issues. To address this risk, RFID ensures that each luggage and user would be paired with the same data that identifies them correctly. So multiple people passing through with different data that identifies them would not intefere with each other. For the families with mutiple bags who go through the scanner, it is a grounded assumption that families register themselves and their children under the same account for the airlines. Using this information, we would give them luggage tags with the same identification data so that the scanner would be looking for the luggage tags to match with any one of the tags on the family members. These are some of the ways we plan on mitigating these risks to practicality.  

“ 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?

Over the week we decided to make the change to remove the geolocation, airtag capabilities on the luggage tag. After discussing with course staff  and ourselves, we concluded that it was an additional task to locate the luggage and would be outside the scope of our use case of preventing baggage claims thefts. Knowing the location of the luggage might aid in that effort, but the issue is that location doesn’t prevent, it only helps with identifying where the missing luggage went after the event. Furthermore, the widespread use of apple airtags makes this task pretty much already solved, so it we would rather focus our efforts toward something that consumers would be more interested in solving (no reason to reinvent the wheel).  

Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.

The above change was conduced this past week before we created our schedule, so the schedule created for the proposal presentation is still up to date.

“Our project includes considerations for __________”

Our project includes considerations for public safety and welfare for airport passengers, which could have a global impact as air travel is a commonly used technology used world-wide. Since our use case for our product aims at diminishing luggage claims theft or midhandling this would help in the safety and security of people’s property and possessions. Lastly, there could be an environmental benefit, as we plan on making these RFID tags reusable by having a disposable bin outside airport exits for people to dispose of their tags so that they can be reprogrammed by the airlines to be used for future passengers.