Referring back to our team status report from last week, we mentioned that not having our design flow fleshed out before the design review was a significant risk that could jeopardize the success of the project. This issue has been resolved as we spent a major portion of last week going into details about the resources we would be using for different hardware and software components and how the system would be integrated together.
As of now, the new significant risk in our design is that we swapped out components that some team members were familiar with with components that we believed would be more practical for our project. As you can see from our new block diagram, we swapped out FPGA Ultra 96 with Jetson Nano because Jetson Nano contains accelerated hardware for AI applications and supports Python. We intend to use USB Camera Sainsmart IMX219 because it’s perfectly compatible with Jetson Nano. In case we are unable to connect the hardware system to wifi, we can use an Ethernet cable instead. We also intend to use MongoDB Atlas to deploy MongoDB in the cloud as it has full support for MongoDB API compared to other database service (e.g. AmazonDocumentDB). Our team members (Paanii – hardware, Likhitha – frontend engineering) have never worked with these components before and will have to spend time learning how to use them, which can potentially create more bugs in our system. However, Jetson Nano and MongoDB Atlas are commonly used in previous Capstone projects or student led projects so we believe there are a lot of helpful resources that will help us resolve any trouble. In terms of cost, MongoDB Atlas is free so we will save a lot of money because AmazonDocumentDB (minimum of $200/month) is expensive to use. Jetson Nano is also free for us because it’s in the inventory.
You can also find our updated schedule here.