This week, I gave the Design Review presentation and also worked with my team on our Design Report. I also created an entity-relationship diagram for the database of our phone app.
In the diagram, we have an intersection table, EventItems, that keeps track of two foreign keys: EventIDs, and ItemIDs. This is because each event has a subset of all the tagged items in our database, and intersection tables are useful when modeling many-to-many relationships, as in this case. I also created the basic layouts and navigation logic for our phone app in Kotlin this week. However, I’ve been running into constant issues with Git integration for Android Studio, as well as common build errors with Android Studio, and these issues may present a significant risk to the project (as discussed further in the team status report). I’ll be preparing to create a mobile-accessible web app version of our phone app, should we run into large integration issues in the upcoming weeks. Three reasons why switching to a web app may be advantageous to us include:
- Ease of development between the three team members
- Product no longer excludes users without Android phones
- Accessibility via other platforms, such as laptops and tablets
Additionally, we could use the Web Bluetooth API to communicate with other Bluetooth devices over JavaScript. I did some research and found that this API would perfectly fit our needs, as it allows you to request and connect to nearby BLE devices, read/write Bluetooth characteristics & descriptors, and receive GATT notifications and when devices get disconnected.
Currently, our progress is on schedule, but I’ll be running some basic tests to see how accessible on phones a web app would be for our project. I’ll also be working with my team members mostly on the design report that’s due this upcoming week.
In the next week, I hope to have completed the design report with my team members and have done some research on using a web app instead of a phone app for our needs. Luckily, there’s quite a bit of slack time built into our schedule for the phone app before further development is needed (after integration with the BLE tags + RPi), so I’ll be able to use this time to set up risk mitigations.