Category: Team Status Reports

This week, our team focused on finalizing both our presentation and key parts of the system. Ella presented our final presentation, and as a group we did a full dry run beforehand to make sure everything was clear and covered all the important points. We also discussed as a team our schedule for the remaining time we have to work on the project.

In terms of overall progress, we’ve successfully tested several subsystems individually, including color mixing,  controller input/output, the focus mechanism, and pan movement. These results show that our core components are working as expected, which puts us in a good position for full integration. However, we still need to integrate the tilt mechanism and run a complete system test to verify everything works together. Moving forward, our main focus as a team is completing integration and performing full system-level testing to ensure reliability.

Currently, the main risks are still integration and timing, especially making sure the LEDs, motors, and controller all work together without unexpected issues. Debugging delays or needing extra components last minute could impact our timeline. To manage this, the team is continuing to integrate and test each subsystem incrementally before combining everything. A key change this week was fully switching to current drivers for the LEDs now that they arrived, which allowed us to finalize the LED setup and made color control more reliable and easier to integrate with the Arduino. No schedule changes have occurred since last week.

Our planned tests are focused on validating full system performance once integration is complete. We have made strong progress assembling the motor systems, so we are close to beginning testing. We plan to verify pan and tilt by recording motion to check rotation angles, test focus by adjusting the lens over distance, and confirm RGB and brightness control through the controller. We will also measure motor noise using a phone decibel meter and check latency by comparing controller input to system response. While full testing hasn’t been completed yet, we are much closer now that the main subsystems are coming together.

The most significant risk that could jeopardize the success of the project would be frying the LED chip or the power supply. Another risk would be not getting the controller to communicate properly with the light. To manage these risks, we have an extra LED chip and have been testing our equipment before we connect it to our power supply. In addition, to prevent the issue of the controller not communicating, we have a backup plan of wiring the controls directly to the light. However, it would cause us to not fulfill the use case requirement of professional compatibility from the DMX side. So far, changes have not been necessary to the design of the system since last week. Our schedule has changed a bit where the integration and fabrication are happening in parallel. This is because we realized that in order to integrate some components, other parts need to be fabricated first.

The most significant risk that could jeopardize the success of the project would be if the parts that we ordered don’t come in time. We originally had issues with getting our LED chip, but it has been resolved. The other important piece of hardware we need is the connection to the power supply from the cable. However, if we don’t receive it, we will have to solder straight from the cable to our power supply, as one of the options. One change to the design of the system was the power and brightness of our LED. This change was required because we were not able to get the previous LED chip we wanted to order. It was lost in transit, and would take too long to get another one. This increases our cost of the LED chip from $10.99 to $15.99. This is still within our budget. Our schedule has not changed still, since we would start fabrication next week and then assembly.

This week, our team continued researching and ordering components for our moving light. Kira presented our design review slides, and we all completed peer reviews for other team’s designs. Ella made substantial progress on the motor subsystem after key components arrived midweek, allowing her to begin more hands-on work. Chloe began drafting our design report, using the provided template. Next week, we plan to focus on completing the design report, finalize component purchases, and Kira and Chloe will begin developing their subsystems, DMX I/O and cooling respectively, as long as the necessary components arrive on time. At the moment, the most significant risks would be the delay of parts arriving, or realizing that the parts we bought are not compatible with each other. To minimize these risks, we’ve looked carefully at the specifications of all ordered parts and only ordered what we needed to get started, that way we can make adjustments as we go if needed. This week, our design hasn’t changed much, since we’ve nailed down almost everything while preparing for our design presentation last week.

This past week, we worked on spec’ing our design and ironing out the details surrounding exactly how we will be accomplishing our project. We placed our first orders for items like the motors and parts for the mechanisms that will handle our pan, tilt, and focus. We also did research into different lens and LED options that we could use, which is still ongoing. Along with researching the LEDs, we are researching how to best handle heat in the system, which will be affected by the type of LEDs we end up selecting. We also continued our research into the best way to implement our DMX communication protocol. 

Since we’re still early in the project, the risks are still things that we are planning for. The most significant risk that could jeopardize the success of our project at the moment is likely running out of time at the end due to unforeseen issues. As of right now, we are planning how to handle the challenges that we foresee, and everything feels pretty under control as long as we can stick to our plan. However, if later in the project we discover an issue that stalls our fabrication time, that could jeopardize our success. To mitigate this, we intend to stick to our schedule and get things done with plenty of time to do unit testing and integration, while also budgeting buffer time to address any unforeseen issues that may arise. We intend to make our system very modular so that if we do have an issue with one part of the system, we are easily able to remove and replace it if needed. 

Our design has largely remained the same during this past week, but we have gotten a much finer level of detail for some of the systems and how exactly we will achieve our MVP. 

It is also important to consider how the product solution we are designing will meet specified needs, including public health, safety and welfare factors (A), social factors (B), and economic factors (C). A was written by Chloe, B by Kira, and C by Ella.

A. For our project, some safety considerations included weight, size, and temperature. Because this is intended to be used in an educational setting, where there may frequently be one teacher responsible for the lesson, we wanted to make sure that our light is easily managed by one person. According to OSHA standards, a safe lifting capacity for a standard adult is 50 lbs, but drops down to 20lbs when the object is more than 25” away from the body. Keeping this in mind, our light will weigh less than 30 lbs, and be no larger than 24” x 24” x 24”. Therefore, we are well under the 50 lb limit and the light will be less than 25” away from the body. Aside from size and weight, temperature is also important to consider. Because users may be touching the light while it is in operation, we wanted to ensure that it would not burn anyone. Therefore, we are designing our light to include a fan that turns on to cool the light when the temperature exceeds 35°C, which is when objects feel hot to the touch. 

B. Our product is designed to be both affordable and educational, which helps address social factors like access to technology and collaborative learning. Many student organizations, schools, and community groups operate with limited budgets and rely on shared technical knowledge rather than specialists. By selecting widely available components and using open-source resources, we are creating a system that these groups can realistically understand, use, and learn from. This approach encourages technical literacy and confidence while making the system approachable and practical for a wide range of users in educational and community settings.

C. When considering our product, economic factors are a key aspect to our MVP. One of our leading goals with our product is to create a miniaturized version of a very expensive professional, commercial product, with the intention of bringing this technology to groups that may not otherwise have access to it. Specifically, we want our product to be accessible for educational settings, specifically schools that may not have the budget to spend tens of thousands of dollars on moving lights and lighting consoles. Through our design process and part selection, we’ve kept this in mind and selected cheaper components that still will function as we need them to. We are thus far well under our $600 budget.

This week, we worked on fully defining the scope of our project and what requirements are needed for our MVP. So far, we haven’t made any significant decisions that could jeopardize the success of our project. At this moment, our biggest risk would be falling behind schedule and having parts come later than expected. To minimize these risks, we have a Gantt chart we are following and have built-in buffer time for delays and debugging. Most of the changes we have made to the design this week was flushing out the details of what requirements we want our project to fulfill and how we plan to do so. We have decided on a DMX controlled light with an accompanying controller. This change allows our light to be compatible with industry standard lighting consoles and the costs of this change would be purchasing DMX to serial converters for our light and controller.