Month: February 2021

This week has been very productive and the stress of the rewrite has lessened. We have most of the front end implemented, and the UI already looks pretty good when it comes to the water level history graph and the set water level aspects. The biggest roadblock however is yet to come with the valve communication as we don’t really have a full understanding of that aspect yet. Reason being, is the documentation on the legacy code doesn’t really point us in the right direction and we don’t have a good contact who knows how the system works. I am still confident the team will be able to push forward and get that working. We have the legacy code and will be able to get an idea about how the communication works, and since we got most of the other aspects done, we will have full team focus on the matter. The sites front end already looks more modern and sleek than the previous version, and while the backend is a question, we will just have to figure out how it will work. I feel a lot better about the project as a whole, and am really excited to get the full feature set working. After we get the communication and the proof of concept sort of working, we will be able to add a lot of cool ease of use features and have more free roam when it comes to what to add to the project to make it a better experience. Something that I have pushed for is SMS texting for updates about the wave lab. I think that will be a nice feature as the filling takes 8-12 hours in some cases which means the researchers won’t be monitoring it as intently.

This past week the team made the decision on whether or not to revamp the old system or not. We did go through with a total rewrite as we thought that the old system would take longer to add features to as the documentation was from 2014 and does not reflect the current system. Not only that, but we will have the freedom to make the software more up to date with current technologies. A rewrite also means that the team will be familiar with the entire codebase, and we will be sure to make the documentation thorough so that future teams will be able to work on the project and add new features. Due to a rewrite, we are pretty behind when it comes to implementation. We are focusing on a basic front end using angular so we can focus on inheriting all inner workings of getting the valve to open through our app. We will have to figure out a few major things that could become roadblocks through our development: communication with the lab, opening the valve through the national instrument labVIEW, and testing as the lab may not be very accessible. There are also things like login credentials, and security features that will be important once we make this app. We will also then have to deploy the app which shouldn’t be too hard but each step could create issues that might take a lot of time to resolve. At this moment the team is in medium stress mode but we are working hard to pump out this app as soon as we can. We have the basic implementation of the website done already, but we still need to add things to the front end. I think we may need some more time as the rewrite set us back as we were doing a lot of planning at the start of the term and designing as we thought we would only need to create the new UI.