Build Blog 3: Team Progress

Hi everyone! The entire team gets together twice a week to discuss the project from a holistic standpoint and each individual on the team provides updates. For this week's blog post, I've decided to turn this week's meeting minutes into a blog post to provide you with an update towards our team's progress.

Mechanical

Structural Design

The team finished making revisions to the structural design and finalized the bill of materials. The team's focus for the next week or so is to send out various aspects of the structural design for manufacturing and to start preparing for assembly.

Electronics Package

The team has also made some progress on the electro-mechanical integration side of things. The wire lengths have been finalized and the team has begun sourcing various off the shelf hardware components.

Hardware and Electrical

PCB Manufacturing

A couple of weeks ago, we had sent out our PCB design to get manufactured and it came in this week! The team has now started working on wiring the PCB to get it ready for integration with the mechanical structure and the hardware components.

Software

Metrics Collection

The first major feature that the software team completed this week was building out that screen to display system health metrics through the Planter mobile app. In a nutshell, the completion of this feature required the following steps:

Emitting metrics on a schedule from the Raspberry Pi via WebSocket
Receiving the metrics in the Planter API and persisting them in a database
Designing the User Interface (UI) to display the metrics in a presentable format
Integrating the UI with the API

Live Feed

The second major feature that the software team completed this week was developing the screen that would display a live feed of both the upper and lower plant trays to the user. The completion of this feature required the following steps:

Emitting Base64 images from the Raspberry Pi at 10 frames/second via WebSocket
Receiving the images in the Planter API and propagating them to the mobile app
Designing the User Interface (UI) to display the live feed streams