The most significant risk is currently the arrival of parts being delayed. Despite the submission of parts prior to fall break, we still haven’t received them, pushing our parts integration and testing timeline backward. We have the hardboard wood, purchased from TechSpark. Once the parts are in our possession, we can start assembling the robot base. Timeline wise, the assembly should only take a couple of hours. Our contingency plan is to make good use of our slack time assigned to make sure we can catch up to our schedule and finish building the robot base.
Another aspect of the design that poses some risk is the overall integration. We would want our Study Session and TTS feature to be able to occur at the same time (i.e. while studying, a student should be able to use the TTS feature and have the robot read to them without it affecting the session in terms of pausing or ending it). We want the WebSocket communications and the TTS processes to seamlessly integrate but there may be some threading issues that we have to account for which may cost us additional time to integrate those parts together. Our contingency plan for this is to use multithreading on the RPi. There is also a chance that the TTS feature might take up too much processing resources on the RPi, affecting the study session and so in that case, our contingency plan would be to have the TTS work directly on the user’s computer through the WebApp.
No further changes have been made to the overall design of the system, and we are keeping a close eye on our project to make sure we adjust if necessary when any further issues arise but as for now, we foresee no issue with our current plan.