All of us have had success in producing our respective components of the accompanyBot. We are confident that we will be able to showcase the whole project come demo day. That being said, we have not tested the whole system as intended with real users selecting files and clicking buttons for a real robot to press down on keys. This is the biggest risk now, as there could be something that we had not considered which would impair the accompanyBot’s intended functionality. To mitigate this risk, we will aim to complete the integrated system by the start of finals week so that we can spend all of finals week testing the robustness of the system before demo day. Additionally, getting the chassis to house the solenoids without them getting stuck has proven to be more difficult than originally anticipated. This is one of the primary focuses at the moment to ensure accompanyBot performs smoothly on demo day. Another major concern is suspending the chassis over the keyboard because it requires the solenoids to be offset depending on if they press a black key or white key. Once again, this is a top priority for the coming two weeks to ensure that it will work on demo day. Thus we will be reprinting parts and re-iterating on the design as frequently as our personal schedules allow.
No major changes have been made to the system. We have mostly been testing and refining the project. We each got a chance to inspect the app, notes scheduler, and first rendition of the solenoid chassis. Upon inspection, we understood what could be improved before demo day and are readily integrating those improvements. For the app there is room to enhance the useability. For the notes scheduler we will need to ensure that the program on the RPi runs on startup and that any errors that might pop up do not cause the program to crash, since it will be difficult to rerun the program while the system is in production. The chassis needs slightly wider holes and more restrictive walls to hold the solenoids steady and prevent them from getting stuck when they retract. These refinements pertain to our current tasks in the Gantt chart, so no changes to the posted work schedule are to be made.