This week, we spent a lot of time working on our design report as a team. It was a big team effort as it involved a lot of special considerations and thoughtful explanations. We wanted to ensure that we were addressing the concerns from our presentation and working on the feedback provided to us. Beyond working on the design report, we each had individual tasks to complete based on how we divided the work of the project which is provided in detail in our individual updates.
The most significant risk that we are facing right now is making sure that we receive the hardware in time to take into account the integration time. We have not yet received the XBee modules that we are planning to use to enable our ESP32’s to communicate over ZigBee. While this is not going to be the primary mode of communication for our node system, we still need them to provide a proof of concept. Seeing as none of the members on the team are familiar with using XBee modules, or the ZigBee protocol, we are worried that their delayed delivery will make integration an issue for the interim demo that is occurring on April 3rd. To plan around this, we are making sure to work on development for WiFi, as that is already implemented on the board, and is the primary mode of communication we actually plan to use for our demo.
We have not had any design or major gantt chart changes in the last two weeks. We had anticipated extra time dedicated to our design report which might have gotten in the way of tasks necessary for the project building itself. Our gantt chart specifies that we should be focusing on getting nodes to communicate with each other over a network, but the type of network is never specified; initially, we had intended for this to be about ZigBee, but this task is now referring to WiFi. Furthermore, in regards to the design not changing, we do intend to keep smoke sensors as part of our node structure. However, we are now looking into changing our original smoke sensor to a more reliable and well documented MQ2 sensor which we need to place an order for by Monday so it can come quickly in order to get well acquainted with it. While the implementation of the task has changed, the task itself has not been modified, and no updates to the Gantt chart have been made.
One of the new tools we must learn that is necessary for us to complete our tasks, is the software used to create an interface on the displays that we ordered. These displays use their own software to establish a general layout template, and then update with information that is passed into it. We will need to learn how to make a template that will match either a floor plan or a set of instructions, and then update it depending on what information is being passed to the display from the pathfinding calculation done in our software. This software seems relatively simple to use – it claims to be drag and drop – but it is another step that we will need to address during the testing and integration phases. Another tool that we know we will need to become more adept with is Eagle. Right now, we have some experience, but in order to successfully design our own PCB, we will need to become proficient. As our hardware pieces are coming in slowly, we are able to figure out how each individual component will communicate with the ESP32 and from there we can plan our PCB that takes into consideration all of our individual components to work simultaneously.