What I accomplished this week:
This week, I made substantial progress toward finalizing our project. I successfully completed our final presentation, showcasing our design requirements, solution approach and testing/validation. In parallel, I worked with my team to integrate the electronic components into the house structure, ensuring that the wiring, placement, and functionality met our design goals for a clean, stable implementation.
I also finished implementing the electronic day/night cycle feature using the LED ring. Based on the system’s real-time clock, the LED ring cycles through our simulated day in 1 minute. I designed a background to make the passage of time easy to comprehend for people attending our public demo.
In addition, I worked extensively on integrating the front-end React code with the back-end FastAPI Python server. This involved setting up appropriate API routes, enabling CORS, and troubleshooting asynchronous communication issues between the client and server. I made good progress, but there are still some final touches needed for the chatbot integration, particularly regarding consistent conversation history handling between the frontend and backend. I aim to finish this piece early next week.
Overall, I logged well over 12 hours of work this week between the integration efforts, coding, testing, and the final presentation preparation.
Schedule Status
My progress is on schedule. While the chatbot needs a few final refinements, I am confident our project will be fully integrated within the next couple of days. No major schedule delays are anticipated.
Goals for Next Week
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Fully finalize and test chatbot frontend-backend integration.
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Polish and submit all final deliverables, including the final video demonstration, the final project report, and the system documentation.
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Assist in preparing the final poster for any upcoming showcase or demo events.
Testing Summary
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Unit Tests
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Day/Night LED Ring Test: Verified that the LED ring correctly responded to simulated daytime and nighttime triggers based on clock inputs.
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Front-End API Connectivity Test: Confirmed that React frontend could successfully call FastAPI endpoints and receive responses.
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Overall System Tests
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Full System Test (House Integration): Ran the house through a complete day/night cycle and confirmed that lighting transitioned as expected without electrical issues.
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End-to-End API Test (Preliminary Chatbot): Tested communication between chatbot UI and backend, ensuring user input is captured and responses are sent back.
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Findings and Design Changes
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During full system testing, minor wiring adjustments were made to facilitate easier routing and robustness of our system. This meant more laser cutting of holes to have the wires route out of the walls.
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In frontend-backend communication, CORS errors initially blocked proper data flow. I adjusted the FastAPI server settings to enable appropriate CORS policies, which resolved the issue.
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Initial chatbot API design needed restructuring to better access the user’s custom data. I am now using a local database filled with the user’s electricity data to solve this issue.