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?
The most significant risk to us right now is the sensor performance and compatibility, especially with our group thinking about acoustic emission and if the sensor will be able to clearly detect corrosion and cracks in our HVAC duct. Right now, we have figured out a solution using literature review and frequency analysis done by Rayann. Adithi has been able to pair our new, affordable, lower frequency sensor with a compatible amplifier that will be suitable before integration. Right now, our mitigation plan is that if the performance is still inadequate, we will use the microphone to collect audio data, adjust the signal processing pipeline, and perhaps expand our feature set.
Another risk we have is that we are unclear about the difference in acoustic separation between cracks and corrosion in our metallic HVAC ducts. We are a little worried about model accuracy and what that means. So, to mitigate this risk, we will make sure that we create our defects using the ASTM international standards, as researched by Mahati, so we can get our testing and data collection as accurate as possible.
Lastly, some of the risks right now are with delay in hardware parts and integration challenges. We have written the code for motor control as well as the solenoid tapper, effectively writing code for our MCU as well as the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. We will know next week how much of a risk this is once we integrate our software code with our hardware.
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?
The biggest change we have made to the project is that we shifted our scope to metallic HVAC ducts only, and got rid of collecting data on fiberglass and generalizing our model to different materials. This was necessary and suggested by our professor so that we can keep our project feasible. This change gives us more time and flexibility to integrate hardware and software together. More than we initially planned. Another change we made is that we changed our AE sensor selection. We have found a compatible and affordable lower-frequency piezoelectric sensor and preamplifier. These changes do not influence our design heavily, rather how we are approaching our project.
Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.
Our schedule remains almost the same except for the fact that building our HVAC system has been moved up to the following next 2 weeks, again. This will be done instead of what we had initially planned to do, which was writing the software. Since the code was written this week, our priority next week is to combine everything so our robot chassis moves and the solenoid tapper taps the wall of the ducts. This will be a hectic 2 weeks managing hardware and software as well as building our HVAC testing and audio collection system but if we do this, testing and demo set up will be a lot easier. We have to build our system now since we will be collecting our own data rather than using a provided dataset from a research paper. This is similar to the schedule that we had given last week due to delays in purchasing and arrival of materials, although since we developed the software this week, our schedule just shifted a little bit rather than us being behind schedule.