Personal Accomplishment
Other than completing the design review report with my teammates, I also worked on a couple of tasks.
1. Voice Synthesizer Script
To assist Shiyi with developing an accessible UI, I created a voice synthesizer script using the open source library Google Text-to-Speech (gTTS). The script allows the user to synthesize any English text from both an input prompt and the command line:
2. Database and customer-side model for orders, items, and the menu
I finalized the representations of orders, items, and the menu both on the cloud database and in local storage:
The design review report goes into detail about the model and how they interact with each other, so I won’t repeat them here. The important thing to note is that, by design, the local copy won’t be uploaded to the cloud until the customer finishes ordering by calling checkout().
I have tested the flow and successfully added sample orders into the cloud database:
3. Staff-side model for orders
I designed a model to represent orders for the staff-side as well:
This object will automatically be generated when a subscriber to the Redis pub/sub channel receives a new orderNum. It allows the staff to view order items, cross out prepared items (using finishItem()), and remove completed orders from the cloud database (using removeOrder()).
4. Redis pub/sub and fetching orders from the database
The Redis pub/sub channel is shared by the customer-side modules (publishers) and the staff-side modules (subscribers). Once the customer-side order publishes its orderNum, the staff-side subscriber thread will receive a message containing the orderNum and spawn a child thread to fetch that orderNum’s information from the database.
I have implemented this functionality as well, but it still requires more testing.
About Schedule
Since all of us are slightly behind, the database and NLP integration hasn’t been able to happen, yet. I am fairly confident that the database component is complete functionality-wise, and unit-testing has been conducted. Therefore, once we meet again next week, Lisa and I will be able to start utilizing the database with data from the NLP module.
Plans for Next Week
Our microphone and infrared sensor are set to arrive next week. Therefore, I will shift gears and start programming the microphone against our RPi 4.
Lisa and I will also try to integrate our NLP modules and database modules during the mandatory lab meetings.