This week, we finished and submitted our project roadmap for the first semester and our First Month Report. We selected concepts for both our hardware and software this week as well, after discussing them with our sponsor. On the hardware side of things, we’ll be using UWB (Ultra Wide Band) to allow the merchant’s device to locate the correct vehicle. Then, the in-vehicle device and the merchant’s device will connect and transfer transaction information using Bluetooth. Our current plan is to use a Raspberry Pi for these devices, as it is a simple and inexpensive development platform. On the software side of things, our team has decided on using React Native for the mobile app framework. React Native is widely used and well-documented, and has support for many communication standards such as Bluetooth.

For next week, we plan on starting on wireframe prototypes for both the customer’s mobile application and the merchant’s device UI. Also, we plan on creating a new physical high-level architecture and component diagrams to describe interactions within the system between the user, in-car device, and merchant device.