Our first class

 

We had our first class today. Hamza, Katie, Tom, and Tong agreed to be in group 3. This blog is named atomizeGothamtank because it is an anagram of our names, and we live in Gotham City. (Tom)

We discussed what we might like the project to be. We're not sure. Maybe a game. Maybe something that processes data such as a class registration system. (Tom)

We discussed platforms. We took inventory of the group's computing facilities. We thought perhaps we could develop an iOS game, but that requires Xcode. Xcode requires a Mac, and not everyone has one. Maybe that's OK because not everyone needs to work on the iOS portion. Those without Macs could do the backend work. Tom offered to share his Mac with the others remotely, but it remains to be seen if that's viable. (Tom)

We envisioned a client-server app that runs on the web. Perhaps it would render properly on both a mobile browser and a computer browser. The back end (webserver) would be on a Linux system because Tom offers his Linux system as a server that's always available. (Tom)

(Maybe something about our discussions between)

(Maybe something about discussing the time to meet and other things we talked about in class)

We finally end up deciding that a table radio will be the perfect project to work on and the raspberry pi would be the base of our project. We also decided that if the table radio became too hard to implement a game will be our alternative. (Tong)

With our project idea finally nailed down, we started to outline what we need to do. We started with a simple definition of what a table radio needs (Wikipedia). Then a visual design to help us have an idea of the end product. (Tong)

We next started to outline the functionalities that the table radio should have. The first idea is a grandma mode and granddaughter mode that has simple functions like those of an actual radio for the elderly person and someone with better knowledge of technology to help set up the channels. (Tong)

We then added the idea that the table radio should also work as an actual radio as it would be useless if there isn’t any wifi. With the idea of not having wifi in mind, we also thought of the table radio having the ability to download and play audiobooks. And just as a joke we thought about maybe adding a few mini-games. (Tong)

Having some ideas about the table radio we started to look at raspberry pi. After a quick scan through their official website and we added some links that seemed useful later on to our google doc. Since we haven’t decided what computing language we are going with yet, we didn’t bother to read all of the sites on the spot as many of them are targeted towards certain languages and needs. (Tong)

(Maybe something about Challenges and hardware and software after it)

(Maybe something about the discussion on Sunday)

We started doing individual research on the radio idea before we come together on February 6th for a remote meetup to discuss our findings. We have a collaborative Google docs where we share links, that way we can make comments on each other's research and ideas. We also started another documented where Tong made a design layout for the radio. (Katie)

All of us have discovered some amazing creations people have managed to come up with. I discovered that the this raspberry pi radio has been done many times before. Even the old fashion knob controls are copied to make it more user friendly. What we are trying to do however is similar but also has a webpage to preset the controls according to which radio stations you would like to listen to. Hamza also showed us a Youtube video where a team built a retro gaming console using a raspberry pi by using an emulator. He even showed us a demonstration of how the emulator looked on his screen. By collecting these ideas and coming together to share them we are able to get inspiration and discuss our own idea further. (Katie)

Deciding on how this radio should function was discussed the most. This is something we wanted to finalized early so we can begin building the software for it. For instance, Tong suggested another control knob for the use

to switch between playlist they have created themselves. In response to that, Tom thought these playlist controls could separate the radio stations based on genre. These are some of the things we spent time discussing in order to see what would work best with the vision we have for the radio. (Katie)