A Bit About Capstone:
Earlier this year, OPEnS Lab submitted several project proposals to Oregon State University’s capstone course for computer science (CS) students. Capstone (or Senior Design) is a three-term course in which students work in small teams on projects that solve real-world problems. One of OPEnS Lab’s proposals was to enhance the OPEnSampler with GSM support enabling long-distance status updates, and to ease the sampler’s configuration with a mobile app that will communicate with the Sampler over Bluetooth. That’s where we come in!
I won’t go into too much detail in this post, but you’re welcome to read the problem statement we prepared for capstone, available in our fork of the OPEnSampler GitHub repository.
(If seeing PDFs in git hurts you, rest assured we’ll be doing some cleanup and reorganization in the near future.)
Right now, we’re mostly getting started by preparing written documents that will guide our future work. The week before last we finalized our problem statement, and this week we’ve been working on drafting a requirements specification. Although we don’t have an exact time-line laid out, our end game is to have completed this project by OSU’s Undergrad Engineering Expo during the Spring (where we will be presenting our contributions).
A Bit About Me:
I’m Travis Whitehead, a Computer Science student at OSU with the exciting opportunity to work on the OPEnSampler for my capstone project (along with my teammates Hunter and Chase– who will also be introducing themselves in separate posts). As I don’t have a lot of background experience with mobile development, microcontrollers, GSM, or Bluetooth specifically– I’m expecting to learn a lot this year!
As a free software enthusiast, I’m delighted about the “Openly Published” aspect to OPEnS Lab. In my spare time, I work as a Student Systems Engineer at OSU’s Open Source Lab a (similar sounding) organization that provides various forms of hosting for open-source projects. Luckily, there’s room in my heart for more than one open lab.
This is the first of many updates I’ll be writing as we continue to work on this project– So stay tuned!