Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone, Spring 2026. Bing Bhakdibhumi, Aiden Magee, Vivian Wang
What did I accomplish this week?
This week I finished implementing the scoreboard and experimented with the solenoid for the Z-drop mechanism. I also helped out my teammates with miscellaneous tasks.
Am I on schedule or behind?
I am a little behind schedule to get our project up and working by Wednesday.
What do I hope to complete in the upcoming week?
I hope to help my team finish up the project, final poster, and final report; in addition to presenting a good demo, of course.
This week we made significant progress towards the final goal for the project. We had a productive meeting with the professor to brainstorm and finalize details for the final product, and met as a team throughout the week to integrate our subsystems and conduct verification. As of now, we are working on finishing the the wirings, gantry system, and scoreboard. We are also working together to finish the slides for the final presentation in this upcoming week.
What did I accomplish this week?
I implemented the game scoreboard, experimented with the gantry and the GPIO expander, and cleaned up the bat wiring this week. I am meeting up with my team over the weekend to prepare for our final presentation in this upcoming week.
Am I on schedule or behind?
I ran into a little road block with the seven segment display as I accidently fried the board, which took a while to replace, so I am slightly more behind than where I would like to be.
What do I hope to complete in the upcoming week?
I hope to finish assembling the scoreboard and help my team out wherever help is needed in order to finish the final builds of our project.
Throughout this semester, I’ve learned most about project planning and keeping myself accountable to my own set goals. Unlike most other classes that I’ve taken in college, I get to (relatively) set my own deadlines for features and functions for my project, in which I am only held accountable by myself, my teammates, and intermittent deadlines. As much as I have forethought about this, actually being in the situation definitely still requires commitment and discipline, which is always useful to practice. Apart from that, I also learned how to do wireless communication between microcontrollers.
What did I accomplish this week?
This week, I helped the team present our project during our interim demos. We managed to get a lot of the kinks worked out with integration and the demos went quite well. I also started programming the scoring system.
Am I on schedule or behind?
I am currently on schedule.
What do I hope to complete in the upcoming week?
I hope to finish the code for a scoring system and demo it to the team on Monday. I will be looking into ways to materialize the program into a physical scoreboard.
In regards to updates in testing and verification, I have conducted qualitative tests for the swing detection and unit testing for the scoring system. The tests for swing detection should remain similar to what was outlined in the design document. The scoring system has been updated a fair bit, where now we will have a representation of runners on base, so there will have to be thorough testing of the possible states of the game in software; once the scoring system has been integrated with the rest of the game, the tests will have to be done in hardware as well.
What did I accomplish this week?
This week, I demonstrated the swing detection mechanism that I have been working on to my teammates. I also managed to use the ESP-NOW protocol to transmit the results of the swing detection wirelessly to another microcontroller. With that, I worked with Vivian to wirelessly control the flipper servo using the IMU.
Am I on schedule or behind?
I am currently on schedule.
What do I hope to complete in the upcoming week?
I hope to finish preparations for the interim demo so we can give a good presentation on Monday and Wednesday. I will also now be working on fine tuning the swing detection.
This week, we worked to integrate our subsystems ahead of the interim demo presentation on Monday and Wednesday. Aiden finished up the physical build of the gameboard, including 3D-printed holders for break-beam sensors, which Vivian tested. Bing and Vivian successfully managed to control the servo by sending data wirelessly from the bat. As we transitioning to the integration phase of our project, we have also started collaborating on our team GitHub repository.
We are meeting up this weekend in preparation for the upcoming demo, in which we will demonstrate the gameboard and hitting subsystems, talk about our experiences with the development process so far, and lay out our plans for the upcoming month.
What did I accomplish this week?
This week, I continued work on building a prototype for the bat swing detection with the ESP32 and IMU. I couldn’t figure out the driver issue I kept encountering with the ESP32, so I had to switch to a completely new board. I also engaged in an ethics discussion during lecture with my team.
Am I on schedule or behind?
I am slightly behind, but I am catching up on lost progress.
What do I hope to complete in the upcoming week?
I hope to finish my prototype by Monday and demo it to the team. Given that our interim demo is next week, I hope to work with my teammates to get a good demo in.
This week, we met as a team to work towards finishing the prototype for our project. Aiden and Vivian spent time in TechSpark to attach the 3D-printed flipper to the newly-arrived servo which should soon be ready for a demo, while Bing worked towards developing a prototype for the bat swing detection. We also made some design changes regarding the surface of the game board, opting for hardboard rather than acrylic due to cheaper costs and ease of fabrication. Additionally, we also discussed our ethics assignment in preparation for the upcoming ethics activity on Wednesday.
Unfortunately, we have also encountered road blocks in the past week in the form of exams and component issues, which slowed down our development process. Although we are currently behind in terms of progress, we are working hard to complete a working demo out as soon as possible. We will keep updating our Gantt chart as frequently as we can to reflect the state of our project and adapt accordingly.
What did I accomplish this week?
This week, I worked on building a prototype for the bat swing detection with the ESP32 and IMU. I ran into some driver issues on my laptop while attempting to connect the ESP32 to my laptop, which took a significant while to debug. I also spent some time reading tutorials and example programs for ESP-NOW, and writing the ethics assignment.
Am I on schedule or behind?
I am still behind schedule; I’ve made sure to tentatively update our project Gantt chart to reflect progress.
What do I hope to complete in the upcoming week?
I hope to finish my prototype by Monday and get to integrating as soon as possible. The missing shipments of microcontrollers have finally arrived, so hopefully we can quickly make up on the lost progress on that front.
What did I accomplish this week?
I spent most of my time working on drafting, editing, and finalizing the Design Review document in the week leading up to spring break. I also picked up the components that finally arrived, though there were some mistakes with the received order.
Am I on schedule or behind?
I am a little behind schedule right now, largely in part to the delay in shipment of the ESP32 and IMU.
What do I hope to complete in the upcoming week?
In this upcoming week, I am hoping to resolve the issue with the parts order while getting to work on prototyping the hitting system.