Risk and Plans
The current risk that we encounter is still similar to what was discussed in last week’s report. Specifically, one of the risks that might jeopardize our progress would be running into issues that we did not expect. This week, when we were trying to tune the radar, we realized it was more complicated than originally thought to be able to detect cars that are traveling in different lanes behind the bike. Since the bike is constantly moving left and right, it would be very hard to use one distance cutoff to determine if a car is directly behind the bike or if it is left/right of the bike. We need to do more testing to find a proper metric. Similar to some issues we had last week, such unexpected issues might lead to lengthy delays. To mitigate this, we still have our built-in slack time in the project timeline, and we try to dynamically adjust the schedule and plan if needed. The adjustment is based on our MVP requirements. We also need to find a fine balance between the accuracy of the system and the time it takes to get it working. This will be motivated by our design requirements.
Changes in Design
- We have settled on using Plexiglass as the radome material
Schedule Updates
Here is an image of our updated Gantt chart for this week, although the enclosure status may be inaccurate:
Here are the schedule updates since last week:
Completed tasks 
:
- Turn signal schematics signed off
- Enclosure sealants have arrived
On track tasks 
:
- UI software development
Delayed tasks 
:
- Radar tuning – Due to delays in the radar tuning, we’ve punted the dates for all tasks to be from 3/23 – 3/29. This is a significant risk as further delays here could potentially cause downstream delays, and this is a complicated task.
- Turn signal development – We have not started on turn signal software development yet, so this has also been punted to 3/23 – 3/29.
As of now, this has not resulted in overall delays, but any further delays in any of those tasks beyond 2 days will cause downstream delays so we need to be careful not to incur any more.
- CAD design/prototyping – The initial CAD design has not yet been completed, but prototyping will begin on Monday which is later than intended but still within the assigned time slot.