At the moment we anticipate that the most significant risk that could jeopardize the success of the project is integration. While we have all been working on separate sections, for the most part, independently, we realize that combining each individual component will take some time. Given that we have about a week before our interim demo, we have multiple mini demos of how we want our system to work from interfacing with the display using solely the ESP32 to broadcasting between nodes such that they recognize temperature changes and can respond accordingly. But we think that combining them together will take some research and extra time and effort. We need to find a good way to highlight a path on the image of the floor plan and once we can do that, we need it to change real time based on the temperature and smoke data between nodes.
Furthermore, we are still waiting on our new batteries to come in for the backup battery circuit. That is a component that we haven’t worked with yet and one that we need to prioritize as it will be a part of each individual node. The order should’ve gone out last week so ideally they will come in at some point in the next week so we can figure out how we want to test and organize this circuit amongst the other components on the node. This is something that we are a bit behind on in regards to our Gantt chart.
One other potential risk is the construction of our PCBs. We recently decided that it may be easier to make our own PCBs rather than order them. However, we have never done this before so it is risky to think that it will go completely smoothly. We will research this as needed to ensure that we are able to complete the construction of these PCBs.
This week we will be focusing on integration for our interim demo. We will be doing a lot of work together to combine our individual components. In regards to our schedule, we have been able to catch up some more but we still are behind for ordering PCBs which we also want to make as a priority for the week. We liked the idea that we discussed with Professor Mukherjee about making the PCBs in house, but we would like to know who to contact to get that process started. We will probably be reaching out this week to finalize those details. Currently, we are happy with the individual components that we have working (Communication, sensors reading, display control, etc.), but now we just need to put all of these items together to get ready for our interim demo. For our interim demo we are hoping to be able to read in data from both of our sensors, signal to other nodes if a fire is detected, perform pathfinding while avoiding nodes with fire, and be able to display the directions from this pathfinding on the LEDs and LCD displays.