Week 1:

   During week 1, we really started to lay the groundwork for the bulk of our project. Early in the week we solidified our subject matter experts. Both Dr. Michael Fogle and Dr. Melissa Halford have agreed to assist us throughout this project. They are both Associate Professors of physics here at Auburn and have expertise in astrophysics, which will be crucial to our project's success. 

   Later in the week we collaborated to make a design document laying out some specifics about each sub branch of our project. This design document was a critical piece of our project as it holds the guidelines for all of the specifics of our project. This design document will continuously be updated to hold important information such as nomenclature and hardware specifications.

   Another task that we began working towards this week was our Android app design. Our two computer engineers have agreed to take the lead on app development as they are more familiar and comfortable with software. Throughout the week they have been working to familiarize themselves with Android Development Studio, which is the IDE through which Android app programming is the most convenient. The app will be written in a combination of Java and Kotin, the two main languages that comprise the backbone of Android software.

​

Week 2:

    This week all team members were preoccupied with midterms which prevented us from getting a huge amount of work done. This is expected to be true next week as well, as midterms wrap up. However, we were able to make progress. In terms of app development, we revised our decision to write our app in solely Java and Kotlin. It seems there are a lot of useful libraries and plugins that utilize Python for astronomical purposes. One main one is Starfield which has library functions to calculate star position. Starfield can also be programmed with a star catalogue without too much effort. This however does come with its complications, as coding our app in three completely different languages presents its own challenges and at the very least will make debugging much more difficult. Our app will also take advantage of the plugin Chaquopy, which has functions to assist converting Python into Java and Kotlin, the main languages for Android app development. In terms of hardware, we are starting to narrow down which specific components will be used in our project, in particular magnetometers. One of our other advances this week was to come up with our first Gantt chart. This will be uploaded with our weekly status report. 

​

Week 3:

    During week 3 much of our team was preoccupied with midterm exams. However, our teammates working on hardware components made some preliminary decisions for which specific electronic components to order for our telescope. We reviewed several options for accelerometers and magnetometers, keeping in mind cost and accuracy constraints. In edition to this our software team made strides in the design of some of the components involved in our app. One notable decision we made was in regard to when we calculate the necessary local equatorial coordinates for the selected space object. One original thought we had was that once a user open the app, it would automatically calculate based off of GNSS location and time of day, which objects from the star catalogue were viewable and compile a list of those things. Then, the user would select one of these objects and we would calculate the local equatorial coordinates for it. However, upon further review, it was decided that the computational cost for doing this would be far too large, considering the star catalogue has over 100,000 objects. Our updated design will perform like this: user enters space object ID, local equatorial coordinates are calculated and a decision is made based off of whether this object is viewable or not.

​

Week 4:

    During the fourth week of our project development our software team finished developing the software design document. This will be a crucial reference during App development as it details a lot of our design decisions and how we plan to implement different application functions. For the upcoming week, our software team will aim to write some actual code to request and pull the GNSS location from an android smart phone. Our hardware team is currently ordering the hardware components that we will need for our telescope. We briefly discussed the possibility of using potentiometers instead of encoders to track the movement of our telescope as it tracks an object across the night sky. However, we quickly realized that any of the potentiometers within our budget would not be linear enough to accurately track the telescope movement. Our hardware team is going to aim to have several component orders placed by the end of the next week in order to satisfy all of our hardware needs.

​

Week 5:

    During this week our software team began creating the first beta of our app. The only features currently programmed into the app are a text box labeled StarID where the user can input a StarID that will eventually be used to iterate through the Hipparcos Star Catalogue. In conjunction with this, the inputed star ID is displayed to the user via the Home Screen. The second major feature we implemented was location permissions. The app can successfully request access to the user's location, and store the users location as longitude and latitude. These are both very rudimentary functions, but it is an important accomplishment to have at least some very basic application features working.

    The hardware team had a slight setback this week. As we realized that the magnetometers that we had purchased will not work for our magnetometer needs. The ones we ordered function as creating a sine wave output as our magnetometer rotates in a magnetic field, with an undefined Vmax. This is a function that could work in our telescope, except they are designed to be in applications were they are rotating very fast, and our telescope will rotate very slow. This means that without knowing Vmax very well, we can't effectively calculate the difference between two very close points on the sine wave, and thus can't nail down a accurate output.

​

Week 6:

    During the sixth week of project development, our team successfully completed a power budget for our telescope system. This was done by tallying the required power for all of the electronic components we will use in our telescope. This was a necessary step to take in development as we must have a battery pack powerful enough to simultaneously power all of our telescope components. 

    Our software team continued working on our Android app. This week in particular was spent working through the different dependencies required for all of the methods we will use in this app. Android development has several major components, one of which is called the Jetpack Composable. This allows the use of composable functions, which are essentially customizable functions in Kotlin. Understanding the different versions of the Jetpack is essential to making sure our app has the proper versioning for all its necessary imports. 

​

Week 7: 

    Unfortunately as the semester is coming to a close, the workload put on our team by their other classes has increased, and predictably productivity has declined. With that being said, we were still able to make progress. Our software team continued to research and plan out our app development. The next major hurdle in the way of this is creating the database structure for the Hipparcos star catalogue within the Android app framework.

    Our hardware team worked to create technical drawings for the mechanical components that will be within our automated telescope. Technical drawings will be a crucial part of the mechanical component of the project. Both so we can ensure effective planning and so we can successfully present our ideas both to our subject matter experts and to any potential audience interested in learning about our project.

 

Week 8:

    Once again this week brought a high work load demand for our team from our other classes. Aside from this almost all the work done throughout this week was focused on composing and editing our Interim Design Report. This report was due at the beginning of week 9, so our team decided to make sure to finalize all components of the design report before the end of week 8. With this came the completion of technical drawings and software flow charts. The updated version of the Interim Design Report can be found on this website under "file share". This is an essential part of project development, becuase without being able to effectively communicate our ideas and plans, we will never be able to create a marketable product.

​

Week 9:

    This week the team worked to update our Interim Design Report again. Finals week is approaching, so not much was accomplished in terms of technical tasks. Nonetheless, the Interim Design Report has been finalized and is ready to be reviewed by the capstone design II instructors. A downloadable PDF of the Interim Design Report has also been made available under this website for any interested parties. Aside from this, our team also reviewed and edited our ethics papers due at the beginning of next week. Our software team plans to work on the development of the app during the holiday break. The specifications of these advancements will appear as bonus week journal entries.