This week, I focused more on building functions in views.py for incoming HTTP requests and responses and different HTML pages corresponding to user login, user profile, and user home page. While the rendering functionality has not been completed yet between pages on the frontend side, it is essential to build the views.py functions as it directly connects user web requests to a lot of backend logic in Django. In addition to this, since we were able to receive a lot of insightful feedback from the faculty and our peers on the proposal presentation, we worked together as a group to reflect on potential changes for the design proposal. I realized there were several things I overlooked while preparing for the previous presentation, so I wanted to go through them with Surya to ensure we meet the new requirements and fully demonstrate understanding of our project design.
Within views.py, action functions check if a user profile exists and whether or not it has been completed (so far, fields to be checked include name, gender, weight, and profile picture). I also included corresponding functions for the rendering of user login, user profile, and user home pages in which the latter two can only be displayed once a user is logged in. A convenient way to handle user login and registration is the forms.py module. This can authenticate the user’s username and passwords, otherwise, throw an error on the frontend side. We want to render these webpages if a GET request is detected.
More testing will have to be done with the HTML pages to ensure they meet our end goal aesthetic in CSS and JavaScript. Each page is built upon a base.html file that includes our product name display, user profile button, logout button, home page button, and daily intake button. This allows ease of navigation between pages for usability and helps us ensure consistency during testing phases.
Moving on regarding previous feedback, a big thing I failed to pay more detail to was defining MVP since these questions arose during the Q&A session. In next week’s presentation, we will clearly define the differentiation between image classification/label reading and scale reading foods in the testing and verification requirement. Although there was a mockup CAD to help explain the entire process of how users would utilize our product, we could have included more use-case requirements from the user perspective in addition to the product design perspective. We made the addition of including latency minimization to ensure data is forwarded to mySQL DB at a reasonable rate. There is also more specific quantitative data to demonstrate the viability of our idea. Surya will included changes in the design presentation to ensure questions from the feedback regarding our implementation will be addressed.
While we did include an overall flowchart in the proposal presentation, we noticed a lot of other groups included a block diagram that either showed an overview of the interaction/connection between interfaces or separated their components into hardware and software parts. Since our implementation has a clear separation between the two components, I thought this conceptual block diagram would be the best approach. Our first block diagram separates our hardware and which software integration fits under them with a clear overall flow. As seen below, the implementation plan includes more details including our software design/development, off-the-shelf parts, and where the user will be interacting with our product:
The CAD design has been updated to include our main design changes:
- Replacing the Arduino camera with an Arduino driver/receiver that directly forwards scale measurements to the cloud as opposed to adding light illumination inside the box as well.
- Using a ring light to ensure full illumination of classified object.
- A hinge mechanism on the door for better user accessibility and help audience understand product use.
We look forward to presentations next week that while not only will address most people’s confusions but also give us more guidance on our ambitious goals for designing a useful product.