Wattdepot Monitor:1..2..3..4..5..Change!

Today marks the second week of the second milestone.

After a brief meeting last week, since we didn't have as much to show, we were sent on our way to continue work on our project.

Our current checklist of to do items stands as:

TO DO

• Visualizer multi-select of sources
• Small layout changes
• Monitor base functionality

Our current progress stands with all of the above items completed. A successful week as I would say.

This week I focused mostly on helping the Monitor team. The base page and drop down was up, so what we needed to complete from last week was to link the page to the Wattdepot servers and display the data. Ed was able to link up to Wattdepot and grab all the data. For man job I was assigned to format the returned data for display. It was initially thought of as a simple job, but the task was slightly more complicated with both of the time values displayed being in a different format. I had to break each one down and rebuild them into something usable for display.

There were two problems that we ran into. The first being a thread issue in which caused what seemed to be a double update whenever we hit the interval. This issue took a somewhat large chunk of time from both Ed and I, and Ed was finally able to resolve it through a time comparison. The second issue which is similar to the first issue is a delay in update, this issue is going to be mark as such because at the current moment we are unsure how to approach it. The issue is caused by a delay from the Wattdepot server when we request data from large sources. Most of the time we have a small 1 second delay for the initial connection and then it runs fine, but in the case with a large source, in our case SIM_OAHU_GRID, the delay time is as much as 10 seconds added to our interval sleep time, so at minimum it was updating everything 15 seconds even when set to 5 second intervals. We've talked to Robert about this issue and he has recommended a fix, but it requires us to update in advance for compensate for each source's delay.

On the visualizer side, we are finally complete with all functionality working. Hopefully this will be or somewhat final release version. There might be small layout issues that need fixing but all functionality is currently working.

On current plans for this coming week is up in the air. Since we might be finishing up with the Visualizer project, we will either be working on enhancements for the monitor or continuing on with the browser project we had put on hold for the monitor. It will play out depending on our weekly meeting.

Here's hoping a finalized visualizer!

Milestone Two Goals Set! Engage~

We are now in the second milestone of our project. With new goals and priorities set we are ready to engage in phase two of our Wattdepot-apps project... after a short intermission.

This past week has been a very busy and eventful week. After reaching our first milestone last week Tuesday, we have come up with some new goals for this next milestone.

During our regularly scheduled meeting with Professor Johnson we have discussed some new enhancements for our visualizer project which is now out in its public release of version 1.0, but he rejected our layout for a more simple layout. We also discussed our new subproject priorities which has had wattdepot-monitor moving up to the top of the list. In the meeting we also discussed about splitting off into two teams, one leading the development of the monitor, while the other completes the enhancements to the layout and our final requested feature for our visualizer. With only three members on our team we decided to split it evenly with one and a half members on each project. With the group indecisive about the middle man, I've volunteer to work with both projects. Although at this point I do not know if I can be a fully functioning member of the team or become a assistant to the dedicated members.

This week also brought about the harsh reality of life and school into our overall goals, the group is hitting some major midterm road blocks in the past and upcoming weeks. Although I do expect the new split in the project to get off to a somewhat slow start. The two(three) holiday weekend, with Valentines Day, Chinese New Years, and Presidents Day, coupled with the busy schedules of each of the projects members have cause the project to lag behind a little.

Currently we have completed a new layout for our visualizer page, although a weird problem in which our html/javascript formatting(mainly the spacing) cause quite a few hours of headaches, we finally resolved most of our issues and have started to focus on the final two enhancements on the visualizer page.

On the other project we have completed a base page for the monitor. Although not functional yet, the foundations for the drop-down menus and the selection in all there. We hope to see a functional application by the next meeting.

Checkpoint Reached: Milestone Pitstop

Its been four weeks since we started the Wattdepot apps project and we are now entering the first of our monthly milestones. At the end of each milestone the groups will present on their progress and it is decided of the project is completed or will be continued.

So the first deadline of February 9th approaches and there have been major modifications to our original plans.

When we first started the project, I felt that we would have all three items : the visualizer, browser, and monitor; completed by the time the milestone came, but this is not the case. Within the first week of our project we were able to get the basic visualizer up and I thought that although with some minor adjustments we were done with it, but that project ended up evolving the encompass the entirety of the milestone.

We are very far from our original basic visualizer and the current version. There are many enhancements and this is the one thing that is "almost" complete, there are a few issues that we will be updating in the future, while all the other projects were pushed back to future mile stones.

I have come to realize now that this one project that are currently one, to refine it to a professional quality may be at least one or two more milestones, but that may have been the original intention.

In the last week we have made many strides since our previous meeting. Not only was it a busy school week for the group members but it was also a super bowl weekend, much which have hindered some of our work time, but we managed to pull through with a decent amount of effort and work put into polishing up the "almost" final version of the visualizer.

While the others worked on refining the code and adding last minute touches, and added in the error checking to prevent and warn users when they are using the product incorrectly. I've also allowed users to query both types of data (calculated and sensor) in this new version. As a group we were able to implement a cancel button to allow users to cancel queries if they wished to. Other than those two big changes most of the time was used to polish up the remainder of the code and get the documentation and wikiPages ready for a distribution onto the public servers.

The one item that we were not able to implement was allow the comparison between multiple sources on the same graph or allow users to view sub-sources of a large source. We hope to be able to complete these features in the future, but for now in the upcoming milestone, I believe we plan to focus our attention on completing the next piece of our three planned applications for wattdepot, the browser. We already have a base page up and it is half working, so we hope to be able to complete it within the week and use the remaining time refining and making enhancements like we've done in the previous milestone.

As far as group work is going, for the most part it has been going smoothly, each member is contributing to the overall goal, although there are still those times were we get into disagreements. We have no plans to split up and work on a different project for the next milestone so hopefully it will go as planned.

One down, three to go!

Three Weeks Down! One to Go! Scramble For The FInish Line!

We are now entering the fourth week of school and the third week of out first project, Wattdepot-Apps. Its been a bumpy trip, but an overall good experience.

Continuing on from last weeks post, we are still currently working on the first two parts of our three part design, the visualizer and the browser page.

In the previous week, the entire team was busy with other classes taking up their time, and two out of the three of use were unavailable during the entire weekend. This delayed the progress of the overall project a little bit, but I believe we were able to churn out a decent amount of enhancements.

The first new thing that we've added to the project is the base page for the WattDepot browser. Ed, our wicket hero has put up the base layout and the ball is now in Kendyll's court to implement the call for the source summaries. We are currently hitting some snags at this point in the browser development as we haven't yet completed the basic functionality of the page for public users. We hope to have this resolved as soon as Wednesday.

Last week Ed and I had finished completing the base page for the visualization and implementing the basic functionality, Ed working most of the wicket and the page layout, and I doing most of the javascript. Since Ed and I were busy during the weekend, we handed the visualization to Kendyll who converted the annotated time line we used into tabular form. To further add upon this we implemented many suggestions that arose during our weekly meetings with Professor Johnson. One of the things we have progressed on so far is having combination box selection for items. Although only the datatypes are currently functional with multiple selection.

Ed and I have also been able to resolve the problem of granularity of the sampling intervals. The problem arose last week when we noticed that when sampling the smallest time frame (during that implementation), one day, it would take well over five minutes and counting and even possibly time out one the data query, when the sampling interval was set to lower than 10~ minutes. We discussed our plan of action with Robert and Johnson at the meeting and we came to the conclusion that we would keep the small interval, but allow the user to choose a smaller time period such as one hour~. So, yesterday morning, Ed had added in time picker drop downs for us to use, and I was able to link them into the timestamp generation functions. We are now able to pick right down to the minute. (Although it is unwise to choose 1 min)

Overall, we are still on track to completing on time, although we have fallen behind a slight bit. We hope to be able to resolve the issues we are facing and plan to switch our focus on the problems with the browser ahead. We can delay enhancements on the visualization in order to have complete functionality of the other two items, but as it stands, we are still waiting on user data for the browser and real time updates from wattdepot, but that area is still waiting confirmation from Robert.