Team Contract Fulfillment :: ECE 445 - Senior Design Laboratory

Team Contract Fulfillment

Description

The team contract fulfillment assignment is a document describing whether the obligations set out in the team contract were met. Project groups should write no more than 2 pages double spaced. This document should have five brief sections each of which corresponds to a section in the team contract:

Project Goals: This section should begin with a short description of what you planned on building at the start of the semester. What were the goals of your project? You should elaborate on whether these goals were met.

Expectations: This section should address whether the expectations set in the “Expectations” section  in your team contract were met. Essentially, were the ground rules your team set out at the start of the semester followed?
Roles: At the beginning of the course, your team outlined roles as part of the team contract. Please describe what your roles are now and–if your roles changed–how they evolved as the semester progressed. Did you assign a leader? Were pieces of the project tackled as a group or individually? Why?
Agenda: How did your team make decisions about the project? How were goals set? When an issue with the project came up, how did your team plan to fix it?
Team Issues: This section should cover team-related issues that your group encountered during the course. What sort of problems did you run into? How were they dealt with? Was the process set out in the team contract followed?  In hindsight could you have done things differently to have a better team experience?

Requirements and Grading

Each section is worth 4 points. Points are awarded based on thoroughness. A section that adequately addresses the questions above will receive 4 points.

Submission and Deadlines

The team contract fulfillment document is a group assignment and should be submitted on canvas before the deadline listed on the Calendar.

BusPlan

Aashish Kapur, Connor Lake, Scott Liu

BusPlan

Featured Project

# People

Scott Liu - sliu125

Connor Lake - crlake2

Aashish Kapur - askapur2

# Problem

Buses are scheduled inefficiently. Traditionally buses are scheduled in 10-30 minute intervals with no regard the the actual load of people at any given stop at a given time. This results in some buses being packed, and others empty.

# Solution Overview

Introducing the _BusPlan_: A network of smart detectors that actively survey the amount of people waiting at a bus stop to determine the ideal amount of buses at any given time and location.

To technically achieve this, the device will use a wifi chip to listen for probe requests from nearby wifi-devices (we assume to be closely correlated with the number of people). It will use a radio chip to mesh network with other nearby devices at other bus stops. For power the device will use a solar cell and Li-Ion battery.

With the existing mesh network, we also are considering hosting wifi at each deployed location. This might include media, advertisements, localized wifi (restricted to bus stops), weather forecasts, and much more.

# Solution Components

## Wifi Chip

- esp8266 to wake periodically and listen for wifi probe requests.

## Radio chip

- NRF24L01 chip to connect to nearby devices and send/receive data.

## Microcontroller

- Microcontroller (Atmel atmega328) to control the RF chip and the wifi chip. It also manages the caching and sending of data. After further research we may not need this microcontroller. We will attempt to use just the ens86606 chip and if we cannot successfully use the SPI interface, we will use the atmega as a middleman.

## Power Subsystem

- Solar panel that will convert solar power to electrical power

- Power regulator chip in charge of taking the power from the solar panel and charging a small battery with it

- Small Li-Ion battery to act as a buffer for shady moments and rainy days

## Software and Server

- Backend api to receive and store data in mongodb or mysql database

- Data visualization frontend

- Machine learning predictions (using LSTM model)

# Criteria for Success

- Successfully collect an accurate measurement of number of people at bus stops

- Use data to determine optimized bus deployment schedules.

- Use data to provide useful visualizations.

# Ethics and Safety

It is important to take into consideration the privacy aspect of users when collecting unique device tokens. We will make sure to follow the existing ethics guidelines established by IEEE and ACM.

There are several potential issues that might arise under very specific conditions: High temperature and harsh environment factors may make the Li-Ion batteries explode. Rainy or moist environments may lead to short-circuiting of the device.

We plan to address all these issues upon our project proposal.

# Competitors

https://www.accuware.com/products/locate-wifi-devices/

Accuware currently has a device that helps locate wifi devices. However our devices will be tailored for bus stops and the data will be formatted in a the most productive ways from the perspective of bus companies.