CSCI321 - Project Diary

Friday, March 31

Locate GPS Supplier - Part 1 - Concluded

After several phonecalls - we have found the device that we wish to use. I called Shawn, to have him check what I read was in fact correct - and that we could utilize the TrackStar device.

I then attempted to call the Taiwanese supplier, and all I got was "we can't hear you" several times, after which they hung up.

Never-the-less, the device is available off ebay and other stores for ~$550 euros.

Fingers crossed ; I have submitted the 'Resource Allocation' - form and can only hope that Saffioti and Willy will approve the device for purchase.

Thursday, March 30

Locate GPS Supplier - Part1 - Continued

After charging up Skype, and spending many minutes on hold - everyone in
the US seems to be at lunch.

And its just my luck that position24's website went down :(

I called USGlobalSat as well as SparkFun. Will give them another yell
later on tonight.

Getting a unit to match our requirements; I find harder than previously
thought.

Fingers crossed.

Locate GPS Supplier - Part1

The search has begun for a decent supplier of a GPS device which will
match our needs.

Those being:

- small
- powered (external)
- under $1000AUD

Have found several possible solutions - one brought by position24.com,
whom I shall call later tonight - but first lets get in contact with
another shop called SparkFun electronics.

SkypeOut - here we go...

Saturday, March 25

Busy As...

The last 2 weeks have gone in a flash...

  1. I have been going to our Weekly meetings, 1 hr before CSCI321 lectures,
  2. Roman and I have been meeting up with Daniel Saffioti each Wednesday after the lecture to give him "progress" reports. Andrew was able to come this week, he has a conflict with a Lab on then but left part way through. We would prefer another time, but given everyone is so busy and Wednesday afternoon is the only day Daniel is available, we make it work.
  3. Lots of back and forth of ideas between us all on how we can add needed and wanted features for our project,
  4. We looked at the RUP templates that IBM has...lots...I recommended that we use the small set from our CSCI222 subject. Andrew is going to do all the initial formatting of these, you know, Project Name, Group Members, Sup, etc...
  5. Installed "Mindmapper" and "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005" and going to have a play with these.

Monday, March 13

Week 3 already :-(

OK, we have had a pretty busy time over the last few weeks and I haven't posted anything in our "Project Diary" yet. Thought I would fix that with a short first post outlining some of the things I have been looking into over the previous weeks.

Leading up to the start of this subject, Roman, Andrew and myself had several discussions pertaining to both the make up of the team and our first “Project Proposal”. The first proposal was devised by Roman and was to be a Host CRM system. We all thought this was a brilliant idea; however, it was not to be. Both Willy and Daniel came to the conclusion that it was “to hard” and “larger” then anything anyone else had proposed before….During this time we also meet up with another student from CSCI321 to see if we wanted a fourth member. Outcome was we are happy with our team of three. Once our first proposal was knocked back we had two options to fall back onto. One was to select one of the projects proposed by Dr Koren Ward and this was the “User Interface for Evaluating Offshore Oil Riser Pipes”. Given my background as a Mining Engineer, I have had a little bit of exposure to this area, and my current work in writing Software Implementation plans for Interface Design I felt comfortable as well as interested in this topic. However, I have been playing with the idea of using Google’s MapAPI to tracked GPS enabled devices for some time. I raised this idea with the team and they loved it. I hacked together a rough “Project Proposal” which Roman polished up. This was presented to Willy and Daniel and accepted.

Since then I have been looking into the Google Map API’s and several GPS enabled devices. I have also outlined several areas that we need to investigate as part of this project and desired features. We have had weekly meeting at Uni to discuss the progress of our proposal and brainstorm on various ideas and issues. Roman has done a heap of leg work looking into GPS devices and other areas, while Andrew has started the long and “painful” documentation process. At this weeks meeting I have proposed that we review all of the RUP documents that we need to consider, and determine which ones we are actually going to complete, based on them actually providing a positive impact on our project. Based on this, and the RUP process, we can then outline a plan of completing these documents so we can crystallize in our minds what the end product will be.

That’s what I can recall of the last three weeks, I am sure that we have done more…but just can’t recall it all. Will attempt to write more regular entries into our “Project Diary” as I actually do things.

Shawn Ready

Sunday, March 5

Agenda for HD

It is imperative for us that we know what is expected from Saffioti for
this subject in order to achieve a HD.

For this reason I emailed him, and will attempt to meet up to discuss a
few objectives that we must achieve and the level at which we will be
eligible for the attainment of a HD.

Wednesday, March 1

Project Proposal - take 2

After numerous iterations of the project proposal. Daniel has finally accepted the following idea:

We will design a system which will allow us to interface Google Maps with various GPS devices.

Also - the supervisor is unfortunately Daniel himself.