Category: Lucy’s Status Reports

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours)

I continued to work on the web apps of this project, especially the bluetooth and backend. Unfortunately, I did not have much time this week so there hasn’t been that much progress on ble yet. I’m learning a lot about bluetooth and am still following the tutorial for the ble-manager to connect the beetle as a peripheral to the app.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

A little behind since the bluetooth is not done yet. Hopefully it will be done by mid next week so that full  integration can start.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Bluetooth and integration between app and bracelet

As you’ve designed, implemented and debugged your project, what new tools or new knowledge did you find it necessary to learn to be able to accomplish these tasks? What learning strategies did you use to acquire this new knowledge?

• Learning more about frontend + backend integration for web apps through online tutorials
• Learning how to parse through important information/documentation
• Learning about BLE connection and how to integrate it on both software and hardware components

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours)

This week, I continued to work on the web app. I made some edits to the frontend of the app to make it look more aesthetically pleasing. Additionally, I did more research on the bluetooth connection between the app and the bracelet. I found two tutorials, one that uses the ble-manager library and one that uses ble-plx. The ble-plx one gave me some issues so I am going to try the ble-manager and hopefully that works. Also, I presented what we currently have for the interim demo, which was authentication, navigation between screens, the customization settings, and the frontend for the decibel readings page.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

On schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

The bluetooth connection should be working by next week. Then, I will start to integrate the data I receive from the bracelet into the app.

Now that you have some portions of your project built, and entering into the verification and validation phase of your project, provide a comprehensive update on what tests you have run or are planning to run. In particular, how will you analyze the anticipated measured results to verify your contribution to the project meets the engineering design requirements or the use case requirements?

For verification, I will run a variety of tests on the web app to make sure each component is working properly.

For the authentication system, I will test different emails and passwords and make sure only the correct email/password combination allows a user into their account. For each screen of the app, I will ensure that it works as intended. Once the app is connected to bluetooth, I will check to make sure the app is receiving and interpreting the correct data from the bracelet. I will test the app in different noise conditions to ensure that the app works in all sorts of environments. I will verify that the decibels displayed on the readings page correspond correctly to the values that are being stored in the database. Additionally, I will check that the graphs, statistics, and history on the app are displayed correctly according to the data stored in the database. Also, I will have good error handling to make sure that bad inputs into the database or the app do not break the system. This will be tested by manipulating the database or deleting a row of data and seeing how the app reacts to it. The app should gracefully handle these errors and should not crash when anything is changed.

 

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours)

This week, I continued working on the web app. I familiarized myself with Firebase and watched a few tutorials on how to use the database and connect it with react native. I spent some time researching how to use it effectively and build the app backend.

For our project, we need to constantly read in mic values, update the database, and display the decibel readings onto the web app. Since we required our latency to be no more than one second between the sound and the readings on the bracelet and web app, I have been looking into ways to make this work. I seem to be having trouble figuring out how to continuously read and update the app page with a constantly updating database, so I have to do more research on this.

Katherine has created csv files with preliminary input data from the bracelet mics. To start, I have been using these files as the “data” in the database and testing to see if they can be displayed correctly on the web app. I have been looking into ways to read in the csv files and display the proper data onto the web app readings page. If this works, it will at least prove that we are able to get data from the mic readings onto the app. I’m not sure how viable this approach would be once we add in bluetooth connection and the database, but it’s a start.

Additionally, I have started building the settings page for the web app. This is the page where the user can switch between bracelet modes and customize the bracelet. 

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

Should be on schedule right now, apart from bluetooth connection and the visualizations page. Since the visualizations page requires data and I haven’t quite set that up yet, I can’t get the actual graphs to work. The frontend for the page should is done though. Once bluetooth is working, I think I’ll have a better understanding on how data transmission to and from the web app will be like.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

With the interim demo in a few days, I hope to have most of the screens of the web app polished up. I plan to show the authentication mechanism, the frontend of the app, and that the app can display the csv input data.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours)

This week, Freda and I spent some time assembling the PCBs. It took a while to get the soldering mask aligned properly since the we had so many small components. Additionally, we ran into a small delay since some of the SMD components we were hoping to use were not restocked. I messed up soldering one of the header pins onto  one of the PCB boards and it took a bit of time to desolder it, but everything worked out fine in the end.

Also, I spent some time starting the backend of the web app. For now, we are pushing bluetooth connection until after the interim demo to give us more time to focus on other features. The goal now is to get the database readings working on the app by the end of next week to demo. For now, we are using Firebase because it is a real time database with a free plan that can suit our needs.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I am slightly behind since the bluetooth integration on the web app is still not done yet. That has been pushed back to allocate more time for the backend of the web app.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Since the interim demo is in one week, I am prioritizing getting as many features of the web app completed as possible. The integration with the bracelet will have to wait. The plan is to have web app and  bracelet working separately by April 1st (demo day), with integration and bluetooth connection happening the week afterwards.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours)

This week, I mainly worked on getting the bluetooth connection for our web app. I researched different a few different libraries and these were the main ones that would work for our project: react-native-ble-plx and react-native-ble-manager.

After reading some articles that compared the two libraries and looking for tutorials on how to get started on both, I decided to go with the react-native-ble-plx library. This library was more popular with developers and I was able to find more resources on how to get started with ble-plx compared to ble-manager. I spent some time getting up to date with the ble-plx documentation and experiment with some of its features into our web app. I also found a tutorial that I am in the middle of watching that has been helpful in guiding me through the process.

react-native-ble-plx documentation

React Native Bluetooth tutorial

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I am currently slightly behind schedule since I haven’t finished the bluetooth connection in the web app yet. I have allocated an extra few days to finish this and then I will get started on implementing the algorithms for receiving the decibel data and displaying it on the app.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I will continue to work on the web application. I will finish up the bluetooth connection and then get started on the core of the app: receiving, displaying, and transferring data to and from the bracelet. I will also help with soldering the PCB components once it arrives on Tuesday.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours)

A large portion of my time last week was working on the design report. Taking in the feedback we received from our presentation, we revised and finalized our written report. personally did the sections for Use Case Requirements, Testing & Verification, and the software sections for Architecture and System Implementation.

Additionally, I spent some more time working on the web application of our project. I started doing research into databases to see which would work best with storing the information from our bracelet. I also started working on the statistics and visualizations page for the app.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I am slightly behind schedule. Due to the design report, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to work on the web app. I will catch up in the following few weeks and make more progress on the software side of our project.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I hope to continue adding pages onto the web app, like the statistics page. This screen would display the readings that are received from the bracelet, including the current noise level and the min/max level for the current app session. I will also continue researching and implementing databases to app. If I have time, I will start looking into the bluetooth connection between the app and the bracelet.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or
photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours)

This week, I spent some time working on the design presentation slides. We finalized our design implementation and ordered our parts. Additionally, I worked more on creating the user interface for our mobile web app. I finished making a basic frontend for our project, with different screens and components. Our app consists of a welcome screen that prompts the user to either login or sign up. Once the user logs in, they are brought to their profile page which will eventually display the decibel readings and noise level statistics according to the bracelet.

 

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I am currently on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I hope to continue working on the web app, improving the UI and start to research into bluetooth connection between the app and the bracelet. Also, I will help my other group members with the PCB design and prototyping. Lastly, since the design report is due on Friday, I will be spending a lot of time working on that as well.