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This week, I focused heavily on writing the Design Report. Starting Monday night, I typed up the Introduction paragraph and detailing our Use Case, Use-Case requirements, and Design Requirements in to a shared document such that my other team members would be able to refer to and work on writing their separate parts (I essentially generated some points to talk about/the structure and they could elaborate on it). Then on Thursday night and Friday night, I dedicated time to working on completing my individual parts. The early half of Saturday, I worked on covering some parts that were delegated to other members but were not finished by the deadline of Friday night that we had set, and Saturday night was spent editing any jarring errors. I also spent some time detailing out everything that had to be done so as to ensure our group did not miss out on any important information in the Design Report, as well as coming up with Monday and Wednesday morning agendas for when we met up to make sure we were on track. Overall, on top of the actual work that I created/ typed up for the Design Report such as research on the various requirements, drawing up most of the diagrams in the report (all flow charts and mock-ups, I also sketched out the software part of the block diagram which Mahlet created), and the actual typing up of the document, I think I also put in a lot of mental labor to try and keep everyone on top of things. I would say that in total, I spent more than 12 hours just on the Report. 

Moving on to our project itself, I have also finished most of the coding for the pages (RPS page, TTS page, StudySession page) this week as well, and now the website resembles the mock-ups a lot more. I still have to work on some CSS elements and making the website UI more user-friendly, but everything seems to be working well. I am slightly behind schedule, as I wanted to have some Text-to-Speech functionality sorted out on the RPi, along with WebSockets, but since these are areas that require me to work with Mahlet and Jeffrey respectively, I will put my all into it once Fall break is over. Included below is some images of the website that I have working thus far:

In the next week, I’ll be working on:

• Cleaning up the UI on the individual pages
• Error handling for the pages
• Building the robot with my team
• Setting up TTS on the RPi/robot

This week, I focused on nailing down the details for the Design Report with my team. I engaged in an in-depth discussion on Thursday with our TA Ella regarding the details about our Use cases, Use-case requirements and the Design requirements. I made sure to clarify and really narrow down on the specifics. From the discussions we had, I worked on defining the features with regards to 5 areas of use case and their corresponding requirements (Power On, RPS Game, TTS, Studying Session, Audio Cue Response). Below, I’ll illustrate the features for Power On and RPS Game to give an idea of what this process was like and what I accomplished at the end of it.

• Initial greeting of a user(Power on, display screen lights up and then robot face displayed)
  • UC Requirement: Power on and display in under 3s
    Design Requirements: DCI display latency
• RPS Game
  • UC: Starting a Game
    • UC Requirement: Start game on WA and robot responds in under 1s
    • Design Requirements: DCI display latency, WS latency
    • UC Requirement: Robot prompts user to start, user presses OK and robot responds in under 250ms
    • Design Requirement: GPIO Latency
  • UC: Playing a Game
    • UC Requirement: User presses input at the end of “Rock, Paper, Scissors, SHOOT!” countdown and robot responds with win/lose output in under 1s
      • Design Requirement: DCI display latency, RPi state calculation latency
  • UC: Ending a Game
    • UC Requirement: At the end of the initially set no. of rounds, the robot indicates Game Over! on display and reverts back to Study mode in under 1s
      • Design Requirement: DCI display latency

…and so on for all 5 areas of use case. We will be basing our design report on the outline that I have created, and I made sure to really think about the details and define everything fully so that this could be applicable to our final report as well.

Following this discussion, I realised that we had far too many elements to our robot, as on top of these 5 areas, we wanted to have a photoresistor for a niche use case (see team report for more details) and the ultrasonic sensor for user presence detection for a total of 7. As such, I lead the team in discussing whether we should consider pruning some features, and ultimately we did end up removing them from the design.

I have also worked on the study session feature this week, and it is still slightly buggy, but I have confidence that I can fix the issues. I have also finished creating all the necessary pages we need for our WebApp. According to the Gantt chart, I am slightly behind schedule, since I also aimed to finish the Todo-List feature this week, but since it is a simpler feature than the Study Sessions, I prioritised that instead. To catch up, I plan on dedicating extra time next week to work on finishing up these features, and since all other WebApp features left to do next week are with regards to the robot, I will enlist help from my team members to ensure we remain on target.

In the next week, I’ll be working on:

• Completing the Design Report
• Completing the Study Session and Todo-List features
• Coding up RPS Game Page
• Coding up TTS Page
• Researching TTS with Mahlet to test a few short inputs