Author: Brian Kim

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.

This week I worked on my problem statement and requirements document. The problem statement was a more descriptive project description, while the requirements document was about creating user stories that complete a working project. Both gave me great insight into the scope of the project, and I now have a better understanding of the project as a whole. I also researched a technology we could use for our project’s communication layer. The technology I researched was MQTT which is a communication protocol for IoT devices. This should work well with our project, but our method is still open to better implementations at this stage. There will be a lot of designing when it comes to our project from UI to logic. As actual people will be using our mobile application, it is obvious our design will be very important. We have to make sure our app is usable and intuitive. This means closely talking with stakeholders and user groups to make sure the app’s functionality makes sense. Beyond that, we need to make sure all of our requirements are met and planned out as there are a lot of tasks to accomplish. Without a planned out roadmap, we could be behind. We need to make sure each story has a time estimate and there is enough time for roadblocks to be resolved. For example, there could be stories that take more time than we estimate, and blockers that could also take up time. We need to be wary of this to ensure each step to the development process has enough time to be well thought out and delivered with quality. It helps that a lot of the classes I have taken so far has given me insights on parts of our software. My usability class has notified me the importance of well thought out design and how it should be an ongoing process when implementing everything within our project. I have also taken an android development class that will help when building the app itself.

This week kicked off the start of our senior design project. Like every new project with a new team, introductions and team rules are discussed. There was something particularly difficult with starting a project with teammates remotely. Since we do not have in-person meetings, it is harder to build relationships within the team. Even though the introductions through email and discord were cordial and laid back it is still hard to build a relationship, and since we are working on this project for months it is good to build a good relationship if conflicts should arise. To combat this notion, I made a conscious effort to be as pleasing as possible to communicate with. I’m in it for the team, and it seemed like I got a reciprocated response. This week we discussed our team rules. Everyone was on the same page when it came to the sections within that document so it is good we all think the same about responsibilities within the team. The project is very exciting. We are tasked to create a mobile application that can remotely set the water level in the Hinsdale Wave Laboratory. They already have the functionality to view the history of the water levels, but they do not have a way to set the water level. As well as migrating the previous functionality to a user-friendly mobile app will be a great experience when it comes to UX experience. Coming back from my first internship, I am excited about the project I will be working on as It will improve the effectiveness of the lab.

I remember going on a field trip in grade school to OSU and the Hinsdale Wave Laboratory was one of the labs we visited on our trip. It is almost poetic that one of the first things I saw on this campus will be one of the last things I will be working on before I graduate.

Hello everyone! This is my first blog post and because of that, I would like to tell you all a little bit about me. My name is Brian Kim and I’m a 4th-year computer science student with a web development focus. I have always had a passion for computers. It all started when I was around 6 years old and I remember my parents had a cube computer and I used to play games on it all the time. It just seemed like magic to me since I was a little boy. Fast-forward to high school, I decided to build my first pc. From the part picking to the assembly and eventually booting it up for the first time it reminded me of when I was a child and how it seemed like magic. It really piqued my interest and instantly made me want to investigate more about how it all worked. Thankfully, when researching majors as I was getting ready to go off for college, computer science was one of them and the rest as they say was history. I recently just finished my first internship at Tektronix. While there, I worked on a learning software that enabled remote control of instruments for universities’ electronics labs. It was a great experience and made me realize I could make a living off this thing that seemed like magic to me way back then. There are many projects in the senior design course that interest me. One of them being the red-light running detection application. I feel that the project could potentially save lives and that is an amazing thing. Technology that saves lives should be the most important ones to implement. I also saw a covid tracking application that will give you the chances of contracting the virus. That is also something that could potentially save lives and lower the transmission rate of it so we can go back to our normal lives. I definitely want to work on a project that will make a change in people’s lives in some way. I see so much potential in how technology can improve the quality of our lives, and I want to investigate those projects. Thanks for reading a little bit about myself, and what my interests are within computer science!