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Gina’s Status Report for 2/8/25

This week, I focused on creating the Proposal Deck with my team. I refined the storytelling and flow of our presentation to ensure clarity and engagement, carefully structuring the slides to effectively communicate our project’s goals, requirements, and challenges. This meant delving deep into the root causes of the problem and identifying user pain points and drawing a direct connection to our proposed solution and the ways in which it can address them. Additionally, I practiced delivering the pitch to ensure a compelling and coherent narrative.

On the technical front, I conducted preliminary research to identify suitable hardware components, focusing on sensor accuracy, power efficiency, and feasibility within our design constraints. I am currently collecting components from the IDeATe Physical Computing Lab to build a mini MVP of our silicone pad. I plan to use an ESP32 microcontroller, a simple LED bulb, and pressure sensors to test the hardware and identify potential considerations before finalizing component selection.

Collaborating with team members, I dissected technical challenges, defined requirements, and strategized solutions. We addressed specific technical challenges and outlined requirements to ensure our solution is robust and effective. The positive feedback we received from peers and Professor Brumley well-reflected our efforts.

My progress is on track with the project schedule. Following the mini MVP testing, Jess and I will finalize a comprehensive list of components, ensuring each aligns with our system and performance goals. We will also incorporate feedback from Professor Brumley regarding our proposal presentation to refine our approach.

In the next week, I plan to finalize the list of components based on MVP testing outcomes, integrate Professor Brumley’s feedback into our project plan, and begin assembling the initial prototype with the selected components.

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Jess’s Status Report for 2/8/25

This week, I contributed to our project by working on multiple aspects of both the presentation, refining our user flow, and coming up with possible solutions to address some of the technical concerns we had. For our proposal presentation, I helped design and structure the slides to ensure they effectively communicated our project’s goals, requirements, and challenges while also meeting the proposal guidelines. I carefully reviewed the content to make sure our ideas were presented clearly and concisely. Additionally, I worked on refining what to say on each slide, ensuring that every point was addressed logically and that our pitch was both compelling and easy to understand.

Beyond the presentation, I contributed to selecting and evaluating hardware components, researching various options that could meet our system requirements. My initial research focused on sensor accuracy, power efficiency, and feasibility within our design constraints. While I identified some promising options, I plan to take a deeper dive into these components in the coming days, assessing their tradeoffs and how they interact within the overall system rather than just as standalone parts. This will help ensure that our hardware choices align well with our system and performance goals.

Our progress is on track with the project schedule. By next week, I plan to have a comprehensive list of all necessary components, ensuring that each one meets our system requirements. I also plan to start thinking about how everything will come together for our design presentation, ensuring that we can effectively communicate our approach, technical decisions, and progress in a clear and structured manner. If given the time, I would like to outline the assembly of a barebones version of our project to test how all components interact once we are able to order them. This will help us identify potential integration challenges early on.

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Team Status Report for 2/8/25

At this point in our project, the most significant risks in our project is the logical work of determining the expiration date of the food. Food decay varies widely depending on type and conditions, especially considering perishables and items without barcodes. The logic and algorithm for predicting the expiration is a big challenge of our project. In order to manage this risk, we are requiring the user to manually input expiration date for the item they are logging for our first working version or MVP. Once manual input is synchronized with LED pad colors, we will build on this to provide an expiration estimate based on product and fridge conditions.

No significant changes were made to our project this week. We simply outlined the technological design of different components in our project and how we want them to work together.

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Sarah’s Status Report for 2/8/25

This week, I put in a lot of effort and time into our project proposal design and slides. Since I am on the software portion of the project, I researched different frameworks and databases we would be able to use in our application that would integrate seamlessly with the hardware and fit the needs of our mobile application. After consulting with my team mates about what type of hardware devices they wanted to use, I decided to use React Native for the app development, FastAPI for the backend and IoT communication, and Google Firebase for the database, cloud authorization, and notification system. Along with the proposal design, I also worked on the website setup. I set up the menu, pages, and categories that our team will subsequently use in the future to provide updates on our project. Finally, I worked on the Gantt chart schedule and distribution of tasks for our team. I outlined what each team member should do in Notion and set a general timeline for what to accomplish so we can stay on track as a team.

So far, my progress is on schedule. We finished up proposal presentations this week and I provided feedback for other teams.

In the next week, I hope to help my team decide what parts and materials we should order to start constructing our project. I also want to do more research on the software applications I will be using to build our web app, along with doing the setup for these frameworks.