This week, team Brick by Bit finished out the semester strong with our official SLDR presentation. We enjoyed meeting other IPPD students, connecting with industry specialists, and sharing our project progress with the IPPD community.

As we conclude the year, let’s take a look at the highlights from the fall semester:

• Delivered our PDR – Created interactions diagrams, component mapping, and action items to begin prototyping
• Communicated with industry experts – Met with specialists to ensure we are meeting client needs
• Completed end-to-end MVP – Established working LoRaWAN node –> gateway –> cloud pipeline with data flow
• Built Supabase database and frontend – Developed a live data visualization dashboard with graphs and real-time node monitoring
• Successfully demonstrated at PID (yay!) – Tested and validated prototype hardware and software integration
• Planned sensor integration – Mapped out additional sensor requirements and PCB layout
• Completed SLDR – Joined the other IPPD teams, liaisons, and coaches to present our system

We are heading into winter break with momentum, and a clear roadmap for PCB design and improved frontend/backend integration. The foundation we have built this semester is strong, placing us in the position to move toward a deployment-ready system. We will be testing our prototype under realistic conditions on an active construction site this December, which will give us more insight into technical refinement.

The Brick by Bit team would like to extend their gratitude to our coach, Dr. Janise McNair, our liaison, Dr. Aaron Costin, the IPPD staff, and the SCI lab team for their support and guidance.

This week we finished our full draft SLDR and delivered a practice presentation to get early feedback from coaches and peers. We refined our messaging, tightened the architecture slides, and clarified the system-level interactions between the LoRaWAN node, the environmental sensors, the gateway, and cloud. Outside of SLDR prep, we also made significant progress on firmware and hardware development for our RAK3172-based environmental node. Firmware has been successfully brought up and we have begun the schematics for some initial custom PCB designs.

This week was a busy one for team Brick by Bit, and involved many steps forward for both hardware and software.

This week was filled with many meetings for the Brick by Bit team. Within the SCI Lab, we reviewed several new sensors for environmental monitoring and made decisions on which modules to bring into our next round of prototypes. We also continued refining our dashboard design and officially began planning the layout for our first PCB. We finally met up with another researcher at the University that studies wireless charging of nodes throughout a farm, and a friend company that does some similar work to what we are doing in the lab.

The hardware team picked out particular sensors to order and begin integrating, a new micro-controller and LoRa chip/module, all to continue the beginnings of our first custom node PCB design. The software team is continuing to communicate with each other to develop a new dashboard, database schematics, and architectural plans for the next implementations.

Week 11 was primarily focused on the PID event. We learned a lot of new things about our designs and where we should be heading when it comes to both the software and hardware of our gateway service. One of the things that stood out was the modularity of our node. Based on our discussion with various professionals, we decided that it would be best to have different types of nodes that come with a suite of sensors that can be activated depending on what you’d like to track. For example, one of the nodes will be for air monitoring, which contains various sensors within it such as temperature, humidity, and air pressure, among others.

This week, the software and hardware teams have coordinated and created their milestones for the project timeline. As of right now, software is focused on creating a schema for Supabase and implementing the first iteration of the database. We are considering migrating to PostgreSQL hosted on the cloud server for ease of development and management of the server, but for now we are sticking with Supabase. They are also focused on creating a new dashboard that builds upon the existing one that was made by a senior design team. Hardware is focused on integrating more sensors into the node such as air quality and pressure which will be parsed in the backend and sent to the database.

During our demonstration, we took a variety of notes, so we have a lot of information from professionals that can be used to improve our design.

After this event, we have much more knowledge on how we should conduct this project for the highest chance of success. We believe our project is very innovative, and could have a huge impact on the construction industry as a whole, so getting valuable advice from scholars that have experience in a variety of fields will help us achieve this goal.

During week 10, our team has been focused on finalizing the prototype design for the PID event, as well as preparing our questions for the professionals we will be speaking with. We started splitting off into hardware and software teams, and have separate meetings for these aspects of the project. This marks a pivotal moment in our project lifecycle because it signifies that we are working more independently on different aspects of the project depending on our background and interests. Much of the previous weeks have been about planning and documentation, but the coming weeks will be more about implementation and hands-on development.

Something we accomplished this week was the instantiation of the cloud as well as deploying the Chirpstack LoraWAN network sever on the cloud. We also parsed the data from Chirpstack so that we can gather relevant details from the JSON file that has various fields about the node and chirpstack profile details. Therefore, we have a perfectly working demo for presentation purposes and have been working on gathering relevant questions about it.

As shown, we are soldering in order to work on different pcb and sensor designs for our product. We have been making additions to the supabase database and are planning on adding different headers to data depending on the type of sensor being added to the system. As of now, we just have simple temperature and humidity readings showing.

After all these findings and additions to our prototype, we feel more than ready to present our design and gather valuable feedback from various professionals. All we have to do before this prototype is review the relevant information that we should be communicating in order to make the most use of our time at this event.