Design Process

This week we finalized our senior project and website. We came up with an initial design idea for what the Interactive Trash can would look like and looked over our website to make any additional final touches. We completed the planning spreadsheet with checkpoints and what we need to have accomplished by when. We made a google doc and listed what research questions we will specifically be answering. Next week we plan on learning more about how object recognition and hardware requirements needed for object recognition. This will be the first part of our research checkpoint that we will be starting. We need to research on what types of hardware will be good for this project as well.

This week we accomplished a lot of our research goals. After gaining an idea of which direction we wanted to take for this project, we needed more knowledge about some topics. The first research topic we focused on was, "What is the difference between machine learning and deep learning?" MathWorks provided us a lot of detailed explanations on this topic as well as some other articles. However, even after reading them there were fundamental details about machine learning and deep learning that we couldn't grasp. So asked the computer science teacher for help and after getting comfortable with the terms, we decided that for our purposes we will be using machine learning for this project. We also did a lot of research on the hardware we will require. We have a couple ideas for this: Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Camera Module 2, and an operator called Noob. Theses are all resources we could get from the company Sparkfun.

Next week we are planning to start wrapping up our research and call Sparkfun to ask them a couple questions about their products that we are potentiality considering for our project. Afterwards we will start to look at the design of our project and start on the Solidworks. We will need to look into how we can use a circuit and connect lights to it. This will be all bout the technical details of the project. And we will probably spend the next two classes finishing up a detailed page with all our research and the ideas we got from it. And then the details on how the project will work.

This week we really started wrapping up our research. I think we have a good amount of information on everything. We may need more as we delve deeper into the design aspect of it. We called Sparkfun to ask them about their products and what assistance they could provide us in the most effective use of them. They have a forum where you can post questions and people are willing to help you out with whatever you may need. So we decided to look more into this resource next time and see what we can do with it. We started some mild research on circuits and how connection will work. We haven't completely figured out how that will work yet. But we have an itinerary design for our project, it is the first sketch we did for our project design. And I think for now we are planning to stick to it, as no major changes have been agreed upon. We finalized our document that details our research with machine learning and possible resources that we could potentially use for this project.

Next week we are gonna start digging deep into the design. Right now we have a basic design but as far as the details go we haven't discussed it in depth. We need to figure out how everything will fit into the top where our device will attach. The specifics of the spatial arrangement of all the hardware and what is the most efficient way to place everything. Once we have that step done we can identify individual parts and start on our Solidworks design. We will not be able to finish the design but we will get started. So our biggest goal is the details of the design, and then start on our Solidworks.

This week we started to finalize how we wanted everything on our device. This week was promising as we were well ahead of the schedule that we had initially set for ourselves, so the work load was a little less. We started a much more detailed sketch of our final design. We haven't completed it yet but are planning to have it done by next class. The significance of this step is that the sooner we have our final design plan, the sooner we can get started on our Solidworks. We have the basic outer structure of our device planned out and that was the only thing we were able to get started on Solidworks. Other than our Solidworks and detailed design plan we had to just start a google slides for our presentation. The goal was to at least start a presentation even if there was nothing on it yet.

Next week we are planning to have a final detailed sketch of our project uploaded onto our group folder in Schoology. Then we will break it down into many individual components and get into our CAD design on Solidworks. We will most likely not finish the Solidworks by next class so we plan to at least have three to four components done by each class. Then we will spend the last thirty to twenty-five minutes of class working on our presentation and get the first couple slides done.

The primary objective of this week was to begin working on the presentation and have some done so we could quickly finish it. We first planned how the presentation was going to look by choosing a theme that would suit the aesthetic of our presentation. After that we started to scout and modify some of the preexisting slides that would prove to be useful. Some slides even had info graphics that we could utilize ourselves. We started planning what would go on each of the slides. then we planned how they would be organized. Work will not split up in chunks as we decided that we would equally work on all the slides. After discussing each slide we have written the content for all the slides and finished it. And as far as final touches go we have that done too, but we would like to see how it would look from the projector too.

Next week we want to have the presentation and all of its content done so we can be able to start mock presentations for practice and to work out any issues that may happen during a presentation and even learn where to position ourselves during the presentation. The goal is to have our slides memorized and be able to present without having to look at the slide much.