Month: February 2023

Nina Duan’s Status Report For 2/11/2023

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:

  1. AWS DynamoDB: fast insertions and deletions, but less customizable and structured
  2. 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.

Team Status Report For 2/11/2023

Our project includes considerations for customer convenience, employee welfare, and restaurant cost reduction. Our system will provide an alternative ordering approach to fast food restaurant customers, and reduce the number of cashiers required. This could also improve existing employees’ working conditions, as they no longer need to shuffle between the counter and the kitchen and can focus on food preparation.

This week, we updated our Gantt Chart to increase slack time at the end of the project timeline. This time will allow us to conduct more end-to-end tests if necessary and fix unexpected issues with our final product. We also created preliminary designs for our whole system, separating the system into hardware, front-end software, and back-end software components. Use-case requirements and testing metrics were updated based on our research about existing fast-food services and hardware systems. Next week, we will finalize our design, prepare for the upcoming design presentation, and start gathering necessary project components.