Author: gmaddalo

This week I helped prepare the final presentation. Additionally, I helped finalize what our product would look like and do real work testing. We also ran survey testing for the accuracy of the pothole severity and also user testing. Our progress is perfectly on schedule and we will be good to be complete in time. In this week, I will be working on the final demo and final video

This week, I continued to work on the GPS transponder with Kevin and debugged the hardware connections. We started by just connecting it on the RPi, but then had some small issues connecting it onto the Notecarrier. I completed the charging portion of our project which connects our product to the car reliably. I worked on the final presentation and helped conduct user tests. We are all on schedule and we hope to finish all testing and demo next week.

Some new tools that I got familiar with was Google Firebase, Google Cloud Run Functions, Notecard, RPi, and GPS transponders. Some new knowledge that I have learned is how to write cloud systems and debug problems in our cloud backend. This mainly includes writing the Cloud Functions, but I also learned how to reset the triggers for these functions. This was especially important when we accidently deleted our database causing our functions to be pointing at a invalid DB instance. The learning strategy that I learned is how to properly plan without needing everything laid out. This allowed me to move fast while ensuring that the different parts of our project worked.

This week, I worked on testing. I finished writing all the test files needed to test latency, with my Firebase Emulator suite. I also worked on making sure that the GPS could be properly connected and making sure our interim demo would be good. Additionally, me and Kevin spent some time making sure that everything we want to send via the Notecard, could be sent. Initially, we realized this was not the case, but after trying different ways to send data, we found a solution. This week I want to test our backend as well as full plug in the RPi.

This week, I worked on the verification of our backend. I wrote some unit tests for our backend functions as well as ran a load test on that. For this load test I ran a burst of requests on a cold invoke, meaning there was no prior functions running. In this 2 minute and 30 second test, I had 8500 upload requests to simulate a high traffic scenario and we had an average of 236 ms upload duration which was well under our time. Even with higher loads then, we will be under our requirements for upload speed.

 

This week I completed my work on the Notecard. I connected the RPi and the Notecard together. I wrote some code which allowed me to upload a photo and metadata. This went pretty smoothly but I did have some issues with the upload issue speed initially. I worked with Kevin to debug any issues which were completely able to solve. Our uploads when timed were actually under 1 minute by a lot, even when underground. I then did some later work to deal with some Firebase issues where we were having duplicate uploads and our functions weren’t triggering. Next week,  I want to actually connect the RPi to the car and make sure everything can work.

This week I worked on the the Notecard. I was able to get everything registered on Notehub, so now I can sync from the Notecard to Notehub. Doing this I realized I had to create another Cloud Function that uploads on request which will trigger when I upload something to Notehub. I verified that the new Cloud Function runs which is good. Next week, I want to make sure that I can use the RPI and actually upload to Notehub. This would involve making sure the RPi5 can see the Notecard and then upload to it as well.

This week I worked on looking into the Firebase Emulator and coding that up so that we can begin unit testing. I am ahead on the coding side as I have already finished the needed backend code for our Storage and Cloud Functions. I also collected the parts and started looking into getting everything brought up. I am ahead of progress on the software side, but a bit behind on putting everything together. That is find though because the order in which we do everything isn’t as important, so timing wise I am still ahead. Next week I want to move my code to RPi and make sure I can connect via LTE to it.

This week I was able to do a lot of the backend work related to Firebase. I was able to deploy my cloud functions and connect with my computer to our Firebase storage. This meant that I was able to test our pipeline of Storage -> Cloud Function -> DB. It successfully worked and we can see the upload in the attached images. Since this worked with little issues, I would say we are on track to finish. I also scaffolded the thread that would be used to upload these images as well when we get info from the RPi5. This week, I would like to make sure that this info uploaded works with what Kevin needs as well as test. On the hardware side, I want to start assembly.

This week I worked on looking at the Firebase/Firestore solution. I will have to upgrade our plan to the non-basic plan to get access to the cloud functions. This is fine though because I would only be charged if we go over the “free” quota, which will probably won’t happen for capstone. Also, I figured out how to simplify our backend a bit. We can send the image to Firebase Storage with metadata attached. Then on upload, we can have a cloud function run and insert everything into our database. So we only need 1 cloud function instead of 2 and this will ensure we never go over our limits as well. I created the backend database in Google Firebase. I also ordered more parts, specifically the raspberry Pi.  I am still on track and then next week I hope to show a prototype of of the working code and finish ordering all parts.