Welcome to the team Electric Eye blog post for the week of 12/6! This week has been extremely eventful for us, and its been a great cap to a wonderful first semester in the IPPD program. We had the SLDR event on Tuesday, wrapping up all of the work we’ve put in to our project over the past 4 months. All of us at team Electric Eye are happy for the experiences we’ve had through this year and are excited for what next semester holds for us!!

System Level Design Review

In the team’s last blog post, we discussed the SLDR event and how our tam was preparing for it. With Thanksgiving break, we had some time to refine our presentation, and importantly, an opportunity to relax and prepare ourselves for the event. We are happy to say that the SLDR event went really well for our team! This event gave our team an opportunity to showcase our design and get feedback from industry professionals from other team’s liaisons. We had a chance to network with those industry professionals and got a chance to ask questions and hear from different liaisons about what it means to be a working professional. Our presentation went very smoothly and we got some great feedback on our design! We are happy to take this with us into next semester where we’ll be getting deep into building our device.

Looking forward to next semester, we have lots of experience to help our next semester of development run smoothly! There’s been plenty to learn from and we know that come next semester we’ll be prepared for the challenges we face. This semester was great for us and we are excited to have more opportunities to apply our knowledge and skills to developing our project! We thank you for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye. Our next post won’t be until the start of the Spring, but you can expect plenty from our team as we pick back up then!

Welcome to the team Electric Eye blog post for the week of 11/22! The IPPD System Level Design Review event is right around the corner, and we have some preparation left before we give our final presentation and submit the SLDR final report. This week the team had a peer reviewed presentation, and we are all happy with our performance! There are still improvements to be made, and with the feedback that we received from our peers, we have action items to work on, but we are feeling confident moving forward into the SLDR day!

Peer Reviewed System Level Design

As stated previously, our peer reviewed presentation went very well! Many of the questions that we received were centered around our hardware design, as this is the aspect of our project that seems to have lots of variability. We were happy to have these questions and felt confident answering them, but for our SLDR presentation we are looking to give a bit more context to our audience. Our presentation was given to software-centered peers, which made the pool of questions we received a bit of a surprise. A group with a wider background may have differing questions based on their understanding of topics, so we will continue to prepare ourselves for whatever questions are had. Overall, our SLDR peer review was a great experience and a step up from how we felt about the Preliminary Design peer review.

Next week is Thanksgiving break! We won’t have a blog post, but we will continue to make improvements on our System Level Design Review! In our next post, we’ll have finished the SLDR event and be giving our retrospective along with what can be expected moving into the spring semester. Thank you for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye!

Welcome to the team Electric Eye blog post for the week of 11/15! This week has been extremely productive for our team as we received some amazing feedback on our prototypes and had an opportunity to discuss one of our planned detection technologies with an experienced engineer from FPL. We’ve been given plenty to think about, and at a great moment in our project’s development for this semester; with our System Level Design Review quickly approaching, much of the feedback we received will be extremely helpful for our preparation.

Prototype Inspection Day Retrospective

This Tuesday was Prototype Inspection Day for all IPPD teams, and the day was a great success for team Electric Eye! We had a chance to show our prototypes to experienced engineers who were able to give amazing feedback on our current designs and directions we should take to enhance them. One aspect of the day that we felt happy about was our preparedness! For many of the questions we received, our team had answers that our judges were satisfied with. We communicated our ideas effectively and because of that our feedback was more specific and allowed for our judges to extend their expertise to us. On a more general note, this was our team’s first in-person presentation besides those done in front of our peers. We are very happy with how our presentations went and feel confident for those we’ll be giving in the future! We also were able to meet our coach in-person for the first time! The event was a great experience and we are all happy to have been able to participate in it.

Next week, we will be presenting our SLDR to our peers! We’ve taken time this week to get prepared for our presentation, using the feedback we’ve received to prepare ourselves. Thank you for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye!

Welcome to the team Electric Eye blog post for the week of 11/7! The team has been working on some early prototyping and have plenty to look forward to with development. This week we took to creating models for our device and have mockups of our UI that we are ready to get feedback for on the upcoming Prototype Inspection Day (PID). This weeks was also our last lecture for the semester, but there is still lots left to accomplish before we move into winter break!

Decisions Before PID

With the PID for IPPD upcoming soon, our team has made some decisions on hardware/software components that we are interested in using. Mainly, we’ve looked at a few cameras that we see as beneficial for our hazard detection. We looked at smaller, affordable cameras, and are leaning towards the Raspberry Pi camera shown below! The team is looking to mix ribbon and USB cameras on our device since a Raspberry Pi does not have enough ports for each. On the UI side, we’ve looked into a few different frameworks that will best fit our device. Much of our consideration is with resource usage, as we don’t want to take away from the processes of our model!

Thank you for reading this week’s post from team Electric Eye! The team has been making good progress and is excited for the IPPD PID. We’ll have plenty more to share soon!

Welcome to the team Electric Eye blog post for the week of 11/1! Today is the first day of a new month, which also marks an important point in our project. With a little more than a month left in the semester, our team is starting to dive into our deliverables for the PID and SLDR. Our team has divided itself up into sub-teams to tackle the different parts of our project, allowing each member to contribute in the best way that they are able to. This next month will be pretty busy for us as we begin to develop prototypes and build the first parts of our device.

New Changes

As our project develops, we’ve set time in our plan for any potential changes that may come to our preliminary design. This week, we had an opportunity to discuss a technology our team was interested in using for this project with industry experts so that we could find the best usage of it. Our questions gave us some great insight into the technology, and also helped us see many of the issues we would encounter while developing with it. Luckily for our team, we had already made backup plans for this aspect of our device and have been able to switch rather quickly before we had much time to develop. We are thankful for the advice given by the industry experts at FPL who gave us this helpful information! Our timeline for the rest of the semester gives us plenty of time to prototype and test with our new technology, and we are excited to get started!

Next week, our team will be giving a small presentation on our testing plan in class while we continue to work towards Prototype Inspection Day. Thanks for reading this week’s post from team Electric Eye!

Welcome to the week of 10/25 blog post from team Electric Eye. This week we presented our PDR Presentation to our sponsor company, FPL! The team put lots of preparation into out presentation, and it was a great experience for all of us. In this blog post, we’ll share more of our experience from presenting our project and discuss a little bit about what’s next for the team.

The PDR Presentation

On Monday, the team had an opportunity to share the bulk our work that we’ve put into the project through this semester! We spent a large part of our last week preparing for the presentation, and we are happy to say that it went very well! We presented our PDR to our liaison and a few other important people to our project, and they gave us great feedback that we look to take with us into our next phase of our project. Our presentation was online, so while we were not able to meet in person, our presentation still went very smoothly. Presenting online takes away the chance for our team to meet with our liaison in-person, but we are excited for an opportunity to meet at the FPL headquarters whenever that time presents itself.

What’s Next For Team Electric Eye

Now that the we’ve completed our PDR Presentation and got approval to move forward with our project, what’s next for the team? We have all put a lot of effort into getting a design that we are in confident in, now comes the most exciting part, developing our project! For the rest of the semester, we’ve laid out a plan for the that has us developing our prototype and training our model to begin detecting hazards. This is the time for our team to utilize our engineering skills and build our project! We have Prototype Inspection Day to look forward to soon in the future, so we’ll be preparing our first prototypes for now. Then, we have our SLDR at the end of the semester.

Thank you for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye, we have a lot of exciting developments coming soon, and we’ll be back next week!

Welcome to the Electric Eye blog post for the week of 10/17! This week we spent our time revising our concept and PDR for our presentation with FPL. Thanks to the help of our liaison, we’ve refined our design and have begun looking towards what is up next for our project. In our programs class time this week, we also had guest speakers Dr. Manuel Bermudez and Ian Baldwin deliver great lectures on the “Scrum Framework” and “Emotional Intelligence” respectively.

Final PDR Presentation

After getting some awesome feedback from our coach and the program director on our PDR report and presentation, we’ve been able to clean up our PDR to a point that fully reflects the work that has been put into the project to this point. With our upcoming presentation, we have spent some time practicing our parts together and feel very confident in what we have! Once our presentation is finished we can get to the fun part of building our device!

Guest Lectures

Our guest lecturers this week gave some useful information and insight into working within a team effectively. We had the choice of 3 lectures for the beginning of our presentation, and the team went to the “Scrum Framework” lecture with guest speaker Dr. Manuel Bermudez as we felt that it would be most beneficial to our team. While we were all familiar with the Scrum development process, Dr. Bermudez was able to answer questions that went a bit deeper then we had previously experienced. Our second guest lecturer, Ian Baldwin, discussed the importance of Emotional Intelligence in the workplace and how improving our own EQ will make us not only more hirable, but also increase our satisfaction in the workplace. We want to thank both of our guest speakers for their time!

Homecoming was this week, so our time together was shortened slightly, but its been a productive week nonetheless. Thanks for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye!