What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
We think the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project at this stage are purchasing the wrong materials. Purchasing materials always comes with some risk because we never know if we will accidentally purchase a component that is not compatible with our system. The way we try to mitigate this risk is by carefully doing research and reading the specifications about the material on the website that is advertising them along with any data sheets if they can be found. We’re planning on purchasing more components than we need, allocating part of the budget for emergency replacements, as well as purchasing alternative backup components, in case something goes wrong with our original components.
Another thing that could jeopardize the success of the project at this point is the timeline in terms of purchasing materials & the time it takes to receive them, getting over any learning curves, and integrating all of our respective subsystems together.
More specifically, our Gantt chart initially suggested that we would wait to generate our BOM and submit purchase orders until all of our main RPI/peripheral circuitry was designed, but we realized that our UI + CAD implementations largely relied on the components we would decide to use for our features. We also realized that the lead time for each of the components we were looking to use differed largely, and taking into consideration the learning curve + time we estimate it would take for integration to occur, we decided it would be in our best interests to start purchasing things as soon as possible. Because of this, we’re hoping to finalize the implementation for our features + identify the components we need by the end of this week. We hope to have our BOM finalized by then and ideally send out our purchasing orders beginning next week. We are hoping to work on this together, in addition to our individual tasks this week, as outlined in the Gantt chart.
Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?
There weren’t really any changes that we made this week since we were working on creating the block diagram from scratch.
Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.
This is also the place to put some photos of your progress or to brag about a component you got working.
