Olivia’s Status Report for 2/17

This week was dedicated to working on our design implementation and gathering resources to figure out what, how much, and where we will buy materials for our project. This week I have put in 15+ hours in different aspects. This included extensive research into parts, meetings with professors to get a better understanding of our options with designs (which after one meeting led to hours of changes to parts of our implementation and different questions/concerns that arose with new methods/ideas for the project), as well as continuously meeting with the rest of my team to ensure we are all up-to-date and informed on any changes the others have made.  While according to our original plan, we are a bit behind schedule, we updated this schedule as we did not realize the real-time timing that it would take to work on several aspects of the project. This truly has nothing to do with being behind schedule, but rather not properly allocating enough time for some work ( figuring out exact specifications for what our design would need) versus allocating more than the needed amount for other work (buying components, setting up design presentation slides and document). This week I hope to deliver the finalized design description for round 1 of our design so that orders for materials can be made by the end of the week. With this in mind, I am on the right track, as today (2/17) I spent +5 hours researching different parts and materials that could work well and have narrowed down the design to 1-3 different options per material/design goal. As well as set up a meeting with Professor Bain to ask his opinion on RFID communication (which was tremendously helpful!), which led to a completely new perspective on how we could implement passive/non-passive RFID communication between the ring and pendant.