Hello, everyone!
This has been a really fun challenge. I've never entered a design challenge contest before but after doing this one, I would not hesitate to enter another one! It's come down to the wire for me and I have to say that while I am a little disappointed that I did not get the final prototype together to demonstrate, I am excited about what I have accomplished thus far. I do plan to continue working on PizzaPi and completing the prototype. I want to develop it to work in different business settings, not just pizza.
With that out of the way, let me show/tell you what I DID manage to get done (the picture below shows my work station during the last two weeks).
Hardware. I want to remind you that early on in the competition I spent time working on hardware communication. This was a real challenge and I ran into a lot of roadblocks, especially when it came to getting mosquitto (the mqtt broker) working. In the end, I persevered and got all three Raspberry Pis talking to each other and sending sensor information back and forth. I was hoping to make a final video of this, but the GPS module is currently unable to pick up a satellite signal. I've noticed this can be a problem at times and I think this could be remedied with an antennae attached to the device. It came online 4 minutes before the deadline! The video is below!
Software. The software consists of a web interface in which all the hardware and database entries can have a place to be viewed. There are three components to this: 1) an administrative interface, 2) a customer interface and 3) a driver iOS app. Currently, all of these are now pulling information from the database and displaying them. They all incorporate a map object so that GPS coordinates can be displayed and routes can be determined. Below are a some videos demonstrating this. The iOS app was a really big challenge for me as I had never written a phone app in my life and had never used Swift or Objective-C (I coded the app in Swift).
Conclusion. Despite not finishing the prototype, I had a blast doing this. I had planned enough time to finish the project but I had to extend my internship at the lab to finish work there, so that took away four weeks that I had dedicated to this project! I want to thank everyone at element14 for sponsoring my design concept and for sending me all those amazing parts. I hope, despite not finishing on time, that they will consider me for a future design challenge! Good luck to everyone and I hope the winner enjoys that really cool Boba Fett helmet.
Thanks everyone!
