Week 4 brought great progress for Brick By Bit, notable in establishing a clear direction for our work this semester. Our focus this week centered around refining our project scope and setting up the collaborative tools needed for project development.

We also began to understand the previous work that has been done on GitHub, exploring the existing codebase and development history. We also created a shared GitHub organization that will be used by all developers working on the project.

In coming days, we plan to conduct thorough literature research which will help inform our design decisions moving forward, such as looking into existing gateways and methods of wireless connection between devices. We will also perform a more in-depth look into the prior GitHub code to better identify areas for optimization.

Next week, our focus will be on preparing our initial Preliminary Design Review (PDR) presentation.

Brainstorming design ideas during our weekly team meeting!

Brick by Bit had a packed third week; we met with our coach, our liaison (gave us a project and lab overview, showed us the SCI-Lab), with Dev (current software lead who gave us a good overview), rotated team roles, updated our logo and name, and knocked out some other assignments.

In class we brain-walked to brainstorm ideas for features that need to be added to the project. We came up with a couple ideas including an app, secure over the air updates with fail-over strategies, custom PCB’s, and more.

After talking with Dev, we have greatly narrowed down the scope of work. He is working on secure communication between nodes, so we will focus on getting the cloud server up and running, as well as establishing a connection from the gateway to the cloud. After these are done we should have a working prototype that we can then begin adding more features too.

Immediate next steps include our team building workshop this weekend, being added to the team’s channel, and scouring it for existing documentation, code, and schematics.

This week Brick by Bit IoT met each other, formalized a team structure, and created an identity for ourselves. We also made advances towards meeting our coach and liaison next week, with plans to gather more information about the project we have been tasked with.

We agreed to rotate roles every two weeks, and for the first week we assigned: Richard (Team Lead & Meeting Facilitator), Austin (Timekeeper & Scribe), Sam (Travel Coordinator & Research Liaison), Justin (Web/Blog Owner), and Mina (Timeline Manager). We selected our team name—Brick by Bit IoT—and sketched logo ideas of a brick dissolving into 1s and 0s. We sent our first weekly memo and a memo template to the coach for approval, discussed how we’ll handle weekly blog entries, and coordinated with Lawrence to schedule a lab tour.

Next week plans include having our meetings with the coach and liaison, getting a better understanding ofr the project and process’s we will take to complete it, and hopefully begin to set up our development systems with tools such as git and jira.