We believe the most significant risk to the project is still the level of environmental noise and interference that will occur with the IR communication. Since our parts have only just arrived at the end of this week, we have so far been mitigating the risk with plenty of research and design into error detection + correction to strengthen the end-to-end accuracy of our solution. In the coming weeks we plan on integrating the LED/Receivers early on with our signal processing code to determine the actual risk and if different parts / more design will be needed to mitigate.
The only minor change to our design is we will likely be using 940nm wavelength IR light instead of our proposed ~1400nm due to higher availability. This will likely be an improvement for the project in general, the 940nm parts are cheaper, have better directivity, and are more suited to IR serial communication due to their commercial use in remotes. This choice will likely incur a small additional cost of us needing to purchase clear IR filters to place on the glass lenses as a safety backup, since the smaller wavelength is technically less safe (although still low enough power to be completely harmless) it would not hurt to include the filters.
No changes have occurred to the schedule, we are well on track and likely a bit ahead of schedule for now.