Personal Accomplishment
This week, I mainly focused on conducting research for our proposal use-case requirements and some components necessary to achieve them.
To properly quantify our project’s service expectations, I took a look into research about service times of existing fast food restaurants and found this 2016 research by QSR Magazine particularly interesting. Although it is about drive-thru service specifically, the research data does suggest that customers expect an average service time of about 200 seconds. A news report from 2020 claims that drive-thru has been slowing down in recent years, which means the expectation nowadays could potentially be even lower.
To achieve our use-case requirements (see proposal), we need one or more directional microphones that can receive verbal inputs from a distance of 0.5m to 1.0m. They will be driven by a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino, which requires USB or I2S connectivity. Here’s a list of some options I’ve found so far:
- WM8960 I2S Microphone
- Raspberry Pi connectivity, compatible with Raspberry Pi Zero/Zero W/Zero
- WH/2B/3B/3B+
- Comes with demo and development guide in Python
- MP34DT01 I2S Microphone
- More compatible with Arduino, includes device-specific library
- CircuitPython module (in Python, C)
- Samson Go USB Mic
- Compatible with with Raspberry Pi and laptops (Mac & Windows)
In addition, I also took a look at available commercial databases. In our proposal, we chose to use noSQL cloud database, which leaves us with two prominent options:
- AWS DynamoDB: fast insertions and deletions, but less customizable and structured
- Redis: supports secondary database models like the document store, graph DBMS, and spatial DBMS
About Schedule
Since we have scheduled two weeks for preliminary research (i.e. to be completed by 2/19/2023, the due date for our design presentation), I am on track with our schedule.
Plans for Next Week
I hope to finalize our microphone, microcontroller, and database selection by next Wednesday, which will allow us to finish our design and start gathering chosen components. I will also be our group’s presenter, so the rest of the week will be spent on polishing our presentation slides and preparing for Monday’s presentation.