Challenges

None of us had worked with embedded systems before so we had to think a lot before taking up this course. 

At first, we had been allotted a different project, name “Person Counting using Radar”. We had to basically take radar data and then apply ML algorithms to it to estimate the number of people in a room, along with the their movements and variations. However, after about one month of working on this project, we realised that the proprietary BumbleBee radar that we were using kept giving bad samples that couldn’t be used for support vector algorithmic approaches. After repeated tries and attempts to make it work, we realised that we had come to a standstill and so we were given the new project.

This added a major challenge since we had lost about 1.5 months of work and we had to complete an altogether new project in just 2.5 months. We spent a lot of time every week to meet the requirements of the project and give our best.

Another major challenge was that we weren’t using commercial beacons for BLE advertisement of the stops. Instead, we had converted the Raspberry Pi into an EddyStone URL Beacon. However, Google has discontinued the support for Eddystone URL Beacon in November last year, and has moved to newer forms of beacon technology that the Pi doesn’t support. And so it took us an immense amount of time to find valid documentation for receiving Eddystone URL data on the Android application.

One more challenge was to tackle the problem of multiple buses and multiple users. We had to make improvements to our code and front end design to add this functionality. 

While making the server, we required a public IP for an IIT Delhi virtual machine so that the server can be accessed without the need for IITD WiFi. However, we couldn’t obtain permission for the public IP due to security reasons and so we had to use an external server for posting and requesting data.

We also had a minor setback when one of our Raspberry Pi’s was accidentally shorted and started malfunctioning. That Pi contained some valuable data that hadn’t been backed up yet and so it took us a while to recover that data but fortunately we were able to do so.

Overall, this project provided us with many challenges and situations where we felt lost and had low hopes. But this was a huge learning experience since we got to deal with real-world technical problems that we will have to face in the future in a tech company or startup.