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Michelle’s Status Report for 10/26

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

  • This week, I looked into weighing the option of rotating the LCD screen versus keeping it in a horizontal display.
  • Rotating the LCD is time costly (as it requires a nested for-loop) and could potentially put our latency past our requirements, but would be better for the physical design.
  • I continued making progress on the design using the rotated LCD, including preparing a CAD model to do initial fit tests on.
  • I began preparing to connect the power SHIM onto the pico, including doing research on what steps to take before/after connection.

Is your progress on schedule or behind. If you are behind, what actions will betaken to catch up to the project schedule?

  • I am slightly behind schedule, as I haven’t been able to print the glasses cases yet. To catch up with the schedule, I plan to do a short sprint tomorrow to finish the CAD and send the print job over to the TechSpark 3D printers.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

  • I hope to have a prototype of the glasses will all components attached, even if the LCD is in the incorrect orientation.
  • I will be working with Alena and Kayla to standardize the method of communication between all components, including web app to the picos.
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Team Status Report for 10/26

What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of theproject? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?

Latency continues to be a risk, HTTP requests with the web app is not a big concern but algorithmic processing may be slow, this is mitigated by the tools we are using, which are efficient, and the categorization of data so that it can be more easily queried.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements,block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costsdoes the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

No changes.

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Kayla’s Status Report for 10/26

This week I created a PostgreSQL database in Amazon Relational Database Service and pushed initial code for connecting to the database from the web app backend and putting recipe data into the database. This progress is slightly behind what I hoped to finish this week, as I was hoping to verify that the web app correctly stores data in the database, but I will complete that tomorrow, and I will also finish collecting 80 recipe URLs to web scrape and store the extracted recipe data in the database. Next week, I hope to have completed database querying code and a populated database with at least 80 recipes divided into breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert categories. I also hope to implement the recipe recommendation algorithm.

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Alena’s Status Report for 10/26

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

Continued to refine voice command algorithm and drafted some new ideas for selecting recipes with voice commands. Most of my work was done on the hardware bringup for the microphone. I was able to get that working with the pico, but there are some latency issues with capturing audio that I am running into. I am trying to debug it by checking the waveform and potentially saving the audio into some output file to test.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

So far pretty on schedule, but a bit behind on voice command/mic integration. I will focus more on debugging the microphone, and if needed, we may need to order a separate microphone.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

In the next week, I will try to finalize integration between the mic and the voice commands/determine if we need a new mic, and continue to iron out any edge cases that show up in the voice command algorithm through our discussions.

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Michelle’s Status Report for 10/20

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

  • This week, I worked on prepping the CAD model for 3D printing. This included figuring out a good fastener system.
  • I also realized that the transparent LCD cannot be rotated, so I sketched out plans for design modifications.

Is your progress on schedule or behind. If you are behind, what actions will betaken to catch up to the project schedule?

  • We are on schedule, since we planned to work mostly before fall break.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

  • By next week, I hope to have a 3D printed casing and attach components to it.
  • This will allow me to make modifications to the design as needed.
  • I will also be working with the battery and power SHIM to allow for hands free power.
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Alena’s Status Report for 10/20

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

I refined some of the voice commands so that ingredients listing is easier and filters out some “random” phrases when parsing the ingredients.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

The progress is slightly behind for embedded integration because I was hoping to have some more mic/voice command testing done but was not able to get that.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

In the next week, I will try to finalize integration between the mic and the voice commands, and continue to iron out any edge cases that show up in the voice command algorithm.

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Team Status Report for 10/20

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 main risk continues to be latency, although so far it does not seem to be violating our requirements, with the voice commands and the web app latencies being below our thresholds right now.

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?

No changes

Part A (written by Kayla)

Hey CHEF! is designed to be user-friendly and provide convenient solutions to ease the cooking process for anyone who uses it. Aimed to help beginner and home cooks, Hey CHEF! can encourage people to cook more often than eat out and reduce food waste overall via custom recipe recommendations given the user’s available ingredients. Another crucial concern that Hey CHEF! helps to address is cleanliness in the kitchen, as the hands-free aspect of the product significantly reduces cross-contamination while cooking.

Part B (written by Alena)

Hey CHEF is designed to cater to a wide range of cultural factors by offering a solution that embraces diverse recipes and allows users to explore recipes from different cultural backgrounds. The recipe recommendation system is built to recommend recipes from different cultures that may use staple ingredients  in unique ways that users may not be aware of. A feature can be implemented for Hey CHEF such that it also can suggest culturally appropriate recipes that reflect the user’s culinary heritage, helping them prepare meals that align with their traditional cooking methods while also offering new options. Furthermore, by allowing users to input their own custom recipes and dietary preferences, the assistant can accommodate culturally specific diets, such as vegetarian, halal, or kosher cooking.

Part C (written by Michelle)

Hey CHEF is aimed to be a resource friendly cooking assistant with a goal to utilize items that users already have in their kitchen. It is often hard to utilize the last bits of food left in the refrigerator, and with so many recipes out there requiring specific ingredients, it may be hard to cook with what one has. We hope the Hey CHEF will minimize food waste in a user’s home.

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Kayla’s Status Report for 10/20

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

Last week I implemented web scraping by parsing HTML files retrieved from Allrecipes.com, and I worked on the design report with my team.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

The progress is on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I aim to set up the database and begin storing the web scraped recipes in the database.

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Team Status Report for 10/5

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 biggest risk that could jeopardize the success of our project is the communication between the Pi and the pico, and also the integration of all the subcomponents after they are implemented individually. We will mitigate these risks by focusing on integration testing after initial unit testing of each component. For example, we’ll need to make sure that the code for microphone input processing works seamlessly with the initial voice command prototype.

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?

We decided to host the website on a Raspberry Pi instead of on AWS just to make communication between the Pi and the pico easier. Also, we’ve lowered our total voice command latency requirement from 8 seconds (4 sec input, 4 sec output) to 6 seconds (4 sec input, 2 sec output), because the voice command library we are using supports a faster response time.

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Alena’s Status Report for 10/5

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week I focused on refining the voice command algorithm, which included fixing bugs for user speech duration and also optimizing some of the background noise filtering. I did some comparison between the Google Web Speech API and the Microsoft Azure API, and decided to stay with the Google speech API for accuracy. I also refined some of the commands themselves, and made a tentative list of the current commands that the bot will support. I also used the pyttsx3 library to successfully generated prompts to respond to the user for each of these commands.

In terms of the embedded side, I did some tinkering with the speaker and the amplifier, and was also able to start some of the initialization code for connecting to the speaker.

Is your progress on schedule or behind. If you are behind, what actions will be
taken to catch up to the project schedule?

In terms of voice commands, we are actually ahead of schedule. However, we are still slightly behind on hardware integration since the PCB layout still needs to be done. We’ve decided to push the PCB back a bit so that we can confirm everything works with the pico on the breadboard first. I will be shifting my focus from voice commands to hardware integration and firmware coding for the next week.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to have the initial voice commands implementation finished, and also the microphone and speaker initialization with the pico done by this week.