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.

Brick by Bit had another productive week focused on project refinement and technical advancement. Our team made significant strides in clarifying our project scope and establishing key connections with stakeholders and technical leads through several important meetings. Our session with our liaison, Dr. Costin, provided valuable project and lab insights, including an overview of the SCI-Lab facilities, while our meeting with Dev, the current software lead helped our understanding of the existing technical landscape.

We have successfully narrowed our focus to complement the ongoing secure communication work between nodes. Our primary objectives now center on establishing cloud server infrastructure and creating a gateway-to-cloud connection. This focus will help us deliver a working prototype that serves as a foundation for future feature expansion (in the coming semester, perhaps). During our brainstorming sessions, we generated several ideas including mobile applications, secure over-the-air updates with fail-over strategies, and custom PCB development that we can implement once our core infrastructure is established.

Looking ahead, our immediate objectives include establishing connections with external stakeholders to gain construction site insights, developing multiple architectural diagrams describing our planned system design, researching hardware board testing methodologies for our specific use cases, and preparing presentation materials for our preliminary design architecture review. With our project scope clearly defined, we are set up for implementation of our cloud infrastructure and gateway connectivity objectives. Our focus remains on delivering a working prototype that can serve as a platform for the features we’ve brainstormed.

We have also revamped our logo!

Meeting with our liaison to discuss project details!

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.