Thomas Lee
- I started this week by working on system integration and verifying that our whole project was operating smoothly end to end. This was in preparation for the interim demo that we had this past week. This involved some code refactoring and submodule implementation, as well as manual testing in the lab to make sure we could have a polished demo. I also went and acquired a lighting kit from the IDeATe lab, getting two new DMX-capable lights, more necessarily cables, and the ENTTEC DMX to USB converter, which a previous group had told us was required to transmit signals from our laptops/Raspberry Pi’s. I set up the new lights and compared their functionality to the previous lighting fixture we had by testing a few different DMX signal generation libraries. I also wrote a few different configurations of Java test scripts to see if they would better and more organically than the older lighting fixture. Below is a video of setting different colors at regular time intervals on the new lights, which are simpler but may have a lower barrier of entry:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZJ4hMDnmAVAk5n2S4THXyMkTPESUGbx9/view?usp=sharing
Unfortunately, we still do not have that great of an understanding of how the different channels and intensities work for the DMX controlled lighting fixtures, especially since these new lights did not come with a user manual. This will definitely require some more systematic testing to reverse engineer the behavioral specifications of the lights next week. - Verification: I will use timestamped requests to determine the user input to internal system round-trip time. This will help us determine the effective latency of our web app, backend, and main RPi core system for our use-case requirement of a responsive & tactile system for users. We will also create a test script that simulates multiple users to check that the system can maintain websockets for and accept requests from 50-150 concurrently connected users. This will verify our system’s effective capacity and robustness. In terms of testing we have already done we have only ran basic functionality and behavioral correctness tests for the queue, recommendation & Spotify API request systems, and the web app.
- My progress on the web app and queue manipulation core modules is on schedule, but the lighting system is behind schedule. There is no way to catch up on progress in regards to the lighting system besides focusing on it and spending more time on the lighting modules, which I intend to do next week.
- Next week I will be putting much more focus on the lighting system, as there are still some issues with controlling the lights finely. I will attempt to learn how to use them better and have some skeleton lighting schemes ready for integration with the other subsystems functioning on a basic level.