Tool Tracker Log

Week 1: January 21-28

This week, we met in class for the second time and were assigned to our project groups. We met briefly to discuss ideas during class, but we did not decide on a final project. Originally, we talked about producing a gadget that could produce a properly portioned protein shake and automatically shake the drink for you. We thought a lot about how practical this idea could be and ultimately decided that the project might be too simple. On Monday, January 22nd, we met outside of class and decided, after much consideration, that we wanted to do an RFID Check-in System. We believe that this project will offer a lot of challenge, but will still be something that we can complete with a lot of research and work.

Week 2: January 28 - February 4

This week, we slightly modified our idea after talking with Nathan. We met with him on February 1st to see the lab for the first time, solidify plans for our project, and talk about our plan for the upcoming week. On February 4th, we met to work on our Wiki page, project proposal, and Gantt Chart. Since nobody in our group has much experience with Raspberry Pi or Arduino, one of our biggest challenges this week was deciding which method to use for our project. We know that there are pros and cons to both of these technologies, so we talked about this with Nathan, but did not reach a final decision.

Week 3: February 4-11

This week, we will continue working on our final project proposal, which is due on Friday of this week. We completed some basic research about RFID technology to get a better understanding of what materials are needed to complete this project. Also, we met with Nathan on Wednesday to discuss our Wiki Page and make sure that our proposal was ready. We split up the parts of this assignment evenly, with some of us working on the budget, the research, the Gantt Chart, etc. Also, during our meeting with Nathan, we decided to use the Raspberry Pi instead of the Arduino, because we know that this will offer more functionality rather than only completing one programmed task, which we will need for our project. Now, we are getting ready to begin more extensive research on programming the Raspberry Pi, and we are also almost ready to place orders for our materials.

Week 4: February 11-18

In class last Friday (February 9th), we received our Raspberry Pi and other hardware components in class. We had a brief discussion/overview of how we should begin to use the Raspberry Pi and set it up so that we can do work on our laptops at home. We met as a group on Sunday (February 11th) for a little over an hour to start working through these tutorials on the class Wiki page. We used the "Set Up and Configure a Raspberry Pi" tutorial to download Raspbian / Etcher and flash the SD card. We also spent our time working on the presentation for our project proposal, which we will be giving this Friday, February 16th. Lastly, we emailed Professor Mell and plan to meet with him on Wednesday at 6:00 pm when we meet with Nathan.

On Monday, we met in the Urbauer lab to connect out Raspberry Pi to the monitor, but we realized after about 30 minutes of trying different tutorials and changing settings on the computer that we were missing a USB power supply cord to connect to our Raspberry Pi. We will try to finish the hardware setup later in the week once we have the cord that we need. We are continuing working on our presentation and plan to meet with Nathan and Professor Mell on Wednesday. At this meeting, we plan to show them our presentation, as well as get advice on how to proceed with the beginning software elements of our project.

On Wednesday, we met as a group with Nathan and Professor Mell. We received the proper cord that we will need to finish setting up the Raspberry Pi, which we plan on doing tomorrow (Thursday). We discussed our project in more detail, slightly modifying our plans. We decided that adding a more descriptive and interactive user interface would add more depth to our project. So, rather than using a keypad, we decided that we want to order an LCD Touchscreen Display, which will allow us to create a more interactive experience and collect/display data in a more useful way. Since we have a lot of room in our budget, we decided that this would work well. We discussed how we plan on splitting up the major component of the user interface programming and many elements of the project that we would like to think about trying. Ideas that we discussed included tracking who has a certain tool, the condition of the tool (and potential descriptions from the user), how often a tool is used, adding an additional place for an administrator to enter the system to access more data, and more. We also talked about the potential of including images into the database when a user is asked about the condition of the tool, but we are not sure if this is something that we want to include at the moment.