Minutes with Professor (Design)
Meeting Dates
January 22, 2018
First meeting of the senior design build phase of the project. We spoke to Dr. Notash about the progress that was made during the winter break and presented a prototype build of our smart outlet design. We reported that we were currently up to date on our project and that we had already acquired most of the parts needed for the project. We all agreed to go about a biweekly meeting schedule for the near future.
February 6, 2018
On this meeting we reported our progress with the physical builds but reported that we had reached some unexpected setbacks regarding power supply development for powering our devices. We presented a possible solution, but this would require acquiring additional components and testing, which we would carry out before the next meeting.
February 20, 2018
We reported to Dr. Notash the great news that our power supply circuit works. Professor Notash advised us to start working on the software side of the project, as to not fall behind, and to also continue working on it simultaneously as we keep building our devices. Dr. Notash scheduled a meeting for next week, in order for us to report on our achievements on the software side of our project.
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February 27, 2018
On this meeting we shared with Dr. Notash that we had a slight delay in finishing our device builds due to the misplaced delivery of our soldering boards. However, if need be we have an local alternative to acquiring the boards we need. On the software side, we informed the professor about our efforts in learning Java and the Android development kit in order to develop the control app. We will be meeting again the following week, by which point we expect to have completed learning and made progress on the app.
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March 6,2018
We updated Dr. Notash on the progress we have made on the app. We have our pseudocode, and are building the app around it. We have hit a roadblock in updating the device lists in real time. Dr. Notash advised us to contact Professor Gossai, since he is very knowledgeable in app creation. We also informed Dr. Notash on our test of our power supply and the resulting electrical failure that occurred. We agreed to try to find a solution to the problem, but we also suggested the potential use of an existing power supply in case that we are unable to resolve the problem in time.
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March 20,2018
On this meeting we informed Dr. Notash of the progress on the app, and the advice we received from Professor Gossai during Spring Break week. Since we were still having troubles, Professor Gossai offered to look at our code and maybe he will be able to see what might be wrong. We also informed Dr. Notash that despite resolving some of the past issues we had with our handmade power supply, although functioning, we weren't able to provide enough power to the microcontroller. We informed Dr. Notash that the devices work as expected with an already made power supply which we tested.
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March 28,2018
We reported some of the progress we were able to make on the app, but also informed him of some technical issues that slowed down our progress. Some valuable time was lost due hard drive errors on the computer that is being used to develop the app. We consulted with our classmate, Derick, on the app and he provided some valuable input. Dr. Notash was also informed on the progress of establishing the network, and our work on having the devices communicate with one another. At this point we have a web server that can be hosted on the smart devices
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April 2, 2018
We informed Dr. Notash of the crash our application was experiencing. We proposed to streamline the application design in order to simplify the processes occurring in the background. We also informed Dr. Notas of the progress we have made with our devices. We have been able to create two servers, one for each device. Our next step is to merge the servers into one.
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April 9,2018
We gladly reported that our project is working. Now we will focus on making final adjustments to the devices and the codes. Dr. Notash suggested we focus on the final report document.