Laundry Alert Log
Contents
Week of January 29, 2018
- Brainstormed ideas for our project and came up with one final idea that we want to go for.
- Talked about what we want our objectives to be for the project.
Week of February 05, 2018
- Billy and Young worked on developing a Gantt chart for 40 minutes.
- Started our project proposal
Challenges for following weeks
- Learning how to use a Raspberry pi
- Learning python programming language
- Learning about Twilio API
- Finding out which vibration sensors to get
- Young updated the challenges, and budget section in the project proposal for 40 min
Week of February 12, 2018
- Billy and Ezra worked on putting together the power point for our project proposal presentation for about an hour.
- For the coming week, we plan to get started with making the Raspberry pi do some things as suggested by the instructor.
- Young downloaded raspbian onto the sd card and booted the pi. Had challenges along the way as the raspbian stretch lite download was not working. Tried to use that download method twice. Switch to use the NOOBS download and worked. Tried to set up the ip emailing from a remote desktop to connect to the pi. Code kept failing when creating the /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf document as the pi would not let me save. Also pi would not let me turnoff Sendmail. Worked for about 2 hrs 30 min
- We had meeting on Tuesday 2/13 for about one and a half hours
- We divided responsibilities among ourselves, finalized the Gantt chart and the budget.
- Young continued to work on setting up the Raspberry pi without success. He tried the method from the tutorial again which did not work again. Tried a method using python code and did not work either.
- Billy and Ezra worked on finishing the powerpoint for the project proposal presentation.
- Young worked on the pi again for 1 hr and 30 min
- IP address emailing is working now
- Tried using the tutorial method again. Each time the raspberry pi boots up, it sends an email that is titled root without the ip address. First thought was that the hash code did not give enough time to the pi to connect to the internet before sending the email. Changed the sleep from 30 to 60 and still didn't work. If the pi couldn't connect to the internet in time in the first place how could it send an email? Hypothesize that the reason it's not working is because I haven't logged in yet from the remote desktop. Tried to find a way to make the pi login automatically remotely from the ssh. Tried using a key. Works for the current ip address of 172.27.44.61. Not sure if it would work with another ip address. Had to use a sudo in the crontab give permission for the code to work. IP emailer works now.
Week of February 19, 2018
- Thursday 22 30 min
Billy set up a twilio account and made changes to the powerpoint for our project presentation in class per Ellen and Prof. Jim's recommendations.
- Saturday 24 2 hrs 30 min
All three of us worked on the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. The circuit works using the 3.3V pin and the 5V pin. However, when we use the GPIO pins, the light does not light up. The code works because when we put a print statement into the code printing a 1 when the light is on and a 0 when the light is off it works. The light does not blink. We tried using multiple GPIO pins and multiple configurations of the circuit but it still does not work.
Week of February 26, 2018
- Challenges
Learning Twilio and how to use it with the Raspberry Pi
- Friday March 2, 2018 3 hours
In order to start using Twilio, Billy had to learn the basics about using the python programming language. I spent most of this time downloading and installing the Atom text-editor that works with Python. After that, I did basic a basic test by getting my program to print "Hello World!" It took a lot of time because I was at first unfamiliar with Python and because I could not find out how to change the directory. However, I finally figured it out and got the program to print.
- Sunday March 4, 2018 4 hours
I worked on sending a SMS message from the Twilio API using Python. What was challenging was installing The Twilio Python Helper Library. I successfully downloaded the library onto my computer but I could not install it using from the Terminal. I kept receiving an error "Invalid environment marker: python_version>="3.0"" I believe this is the only issue in the way of us sending an sms to the user because as soon as the library is installed, the program will be able to send an sms successfully.
