This week’s main focus was meeting up with our project partner and gathering insights and requirements for our requirements document. During our meeting we discussed things about the Hinsdale Wave Laboratory as well as how the current system works. We learned that there is need for a more efficient and user-friendly feature rich application that makes it easier to fill their facilities. We learned that the website sends messages to a server that the lab computer parses to open the valve, but there is no system in place to be able to set a target water level. That is our main feature we will be developing. There is currently no way to drain the water remotely, and lab researchers will have to do that manually as they need a special motor that can connect to the lab computer. The lab computer uses a National Instruments python library to send/receive commands that eventually reach the website. Our task stays the same, a mobile application that has a good UI, and can set a target water level at the laboratory. Our requirements document has every necessary story for our project to be considered done. As the functionalities are not hugely complex in our estimations, we see that we will have a lot of time to dedicate to UX and smaller features that make the app efficient and easy to use by lab researchers. Not only that, but the team has some experience with mobile app development so the learning curve will not be as bad and implementation can start quickly. Moreover, I have experience with using National Instruments libraries and python. Our team seems to have a good plan and each part is already broken down into smaller pieces. The individual parts are broken into mobile UI, mobile backend, server maintenance, and lab computer setup. While each team member will be assigned to one of these parts, collaboration is still going to be encouraged to be as efficient as possible.
