Rounding Third: Union of the Pieces

I've been worried for quite a while on the current state of this new project I'm working on. With my original project, the Wattdepot-Apps, ending I quickly jumped into a new, already existing, group for the next leg of the semester. This had brought with it many problems related to time constraints and the integration of the new members of the group.

I must admit that we are working together a lot more. We do regular speak to each other and talk about the current status of the project. It is very different from my previous group, as we were always working close with each other, every part of an application was a team effort, but at this point the group is not as cohesive. In other words, we are like two separate groups. Edwin and Alan are putting together the code for the meters, while Anthony and I work on getting a Simulation of data that we will be using. We are all over the place so much that a lot of times, I have no idea what Alan and Edwin have done so far, and only am I updated the next time we meet. I also cannot add any code into subversion because I had been given old code that was working and the status of their projects have progressed too far off from the old one. Although it shouldn't be a problem as my part of this project is not reliant on that of the others, at the end what we hope to accomplish is to connect everything together and pray that it works.

For this week, I've generated some estimated numbers based on my interviews with dorm students from the previous week, in conjunction with some research on the power usage of common dorm items. We created some spreadsheets to look at the graphs generated to make sure it shows a good and probably distribution of energy usage throughout the day.

Left is the weekdays % of the total max estimated usage of 26.5 Kw, right is the weekend estimated values. The graphs are on the same scale, but my screen shot alignments need some work.

We then modified in existing methods of the basic (random) class they were using to allow easy configuration with our simulated data which could be changed at any time. We did this by creating an abstract class, which is very similar to using an interface. I added in abstract methods to which the classes use, so now by can use generic "Data" objects that can switch from giving random numbers from the basic or using our Simulated (pre-defined) numbers that model our graph.

I hear on the other end that Edwin and Alan are inches away from getting their meter code it work the way we want it to. So far on my end it looks like we are wrapping up the simulated data and will be look forward to connecting everything together into a final product for presentation.