We almost have deployment!!

(sorry this is late!!!!)

so yesterday we had yet another meeting with ms. martin, she made a call for us to mr. cardenas. we had a talk with him confirming what the people from island signal told him. he told us that we need to either put a box with a battery and speaker in the hallway somewhere or we would have to just run a speaker from the office to somewhere else in order to announce the buses. ms martin said that this was a cost that was unecessary because she didnt want to spend money on something that could possibly be in effect for only a couple of weeks. instead we have a new plan, on monday mr cardenas will have the bus drivers announce their passing of akahi over the radio. we were given a radio in order to listen in on this and then we will be able to relay this to the students via the PA system. if we are able to, we will continue this for the next week or so. this will be our official deployment of our project.

Never give up, never surrender!

Today during homeroom our group had another meeting with Mrs. Martin just to clear things up about what was going to be implemented, if something were to be implemented at all. As Kenny explained in the previous blogpost, we were hoping to go with the first option Mr. Cardenas offered, but after taking a second look at Mr. Cardernas' email, we all (Mrs. Martin and our group) came to the conclusion that implementing the radio by the due date, or even by the end of the year, would be nearly impossible. First off, the labor costs to have someone install this would go beyond our $100 budget. Secondly, to install things, work permits have to be sent in 2 weeks before the expected installation date. In two weeks let's see....it'll be summer! Haha, but in all serious-ness, today brought us to the end of the radio road. But! You know what? We're not gonna give up there! Just because what we planned for in our proposal and detailed design didn't work, doesn't mean we're not gonna either!

From this we've developed a new plan...a new PLAN A :) So, with this idea, we plan to manually make the bus announcements ourselves using our own man-power. It'll work because someone will be down at Paki letting the two other group members at the top which buses are coming up, and these two group members will make the announcements over the PA system themselves. Even though our first plan wasn't able to be followed through...we will NEVER give up and NEVER surrender!

elima hou la!

not much time left!

yesterday mr. cardenas met with a representative from island signal to discuss how to go about linking the PA and radio systems together. aparently the people at island signal thought that we had a different type of system implemented at our school (a stand alone system) when we infact have a system that is linked through the phone systems. this complicates things a little bit but is fixable by two possible methods that mr. cardenas explain to us via email. the first is to connect the radio from the transportation department to a completely separate speaker which would be placed somewhere in konia circle. the second solution is a little bit fuzzy to me but i think it means this, we would mount a box in the hallway of konia somewhere with a power source and the radio in it. there would also be a speaker connected to the radio most likely wired to outside of the box. we would simply open the box after school and turn on the radio so that it would transmit to the speaker and then turn it off later on. both of the solutions are simple sounding but will require a lot of work if we are to complete them on time. we have a meeting tomorrow with ms. martin to hopefully clear up some of the confusion that we have and to decide and move forward with which ever solution we choose to go with.

Island Signal

Courtesy of http://www.fcs.com/index.php?h=Voip

Today I received an email from Mr. Cardenas informing our group that he was meeting someone from Island Signal at Smith Office to discuss the workings of the PA system in regards to our transportation project. We did not attend, but  I also created (based on Rachelle's charts) a bus timetable prototype that we sent to Mrs. Martin and Mr. Cardenas to get their feedback. Mr. Cardenas felt that we should remove the times and keep it basic, leaving just the order of the buses so that kids know the order, but I think perpetual bus riders will know what order their bus generally comes in because they've ridden it for so long, so the times are more important to list. But we will fix that and generally make it better and hopefully tomorrow will yield important and eventful results. We are hoping that we will be instructed on how to work the PA system tomorrow and we will do a test run.

Ahead But Behind O.o

On the plus side, we're moving forward and we're getting our oral presentation as well as our final report in order for May 18th. We also had a successful meeting (as outlined by Rachelle in the previous post) on Friday, where we met and talked with Mrs. Martin and Robert Cardenas for the first time. He sent me a follow up email today in response to the one I sent him on Friday regarding our meeting and our plans for this week, noting that he had contacted Island Signal and someone would come out (possibly) tomorrow, but they would confirm...tomorrow. BUT-- we are planning to do some test runs this week, and we'll (hopefully) be talking to Mrs. Martin regarding this tomorrow. Although we didn't get our prototype deployed by Friday as we had hoped, we're still going strong and we're definitely going to finish off this quarter as CHAMPS :))

We're on track..just not 100% on time

Picture of Nikki and I's readmit after having our meeting at the office

Today was a very VeRy VERY productive day because we were finally to have the meeting with both Mrs. Martin and Mr. Cardenas in person. Previous to this we've only been conducting emails, which were useful, but harder to get communication flowing because responses on-time weren't always guaranteed. At the beginning of meeting we went over what our plan was to refresh everyone's memory and we told Mrs. Martin and Mr. Cardenas what we hoped to have implemented by our due date. Sadly, we found that it's not physically possible to install the radio to the PA system by today (the due date), but they said we could have a dry-run Monday afternoon. Although today is supposed to be the date that our prototype is up and running, we're just glad we've cleared up the communication problem and have a plan worked out. We're very excited to see how everything will come together Monday and we'll see if our solution is doable!

WAN MOA DEI!!!!!

this is our prezi that we are working on for our final presentation. today we spent some time working on it as well as deciding what attire we are going to wear. i think we are just gonna go for broke on it and wear super fancy because it is basically free pointage.

so today is the day before our prototype must be up and running (just like the freshmen and sophomores tomorrow!) and we still haven't corresponded with mr. Cardenas (FINALLY figured out how to pronounce that btw) about setting up a meeting with him and Ms. Martin. this being kind of an issue, our group took a field trip down to smith office and ms. Martin set up a meeting for us with herself and Mr. Cardenas tomorrow at 10:16 during our physics period. unfortunately this means that our entire group will be unable to take the test tomorrow but we will be sure to make it up promptly! well if we are unable to acquire a radio by tomorrow for use in our prototype, we will have to do this in a slightly more difficult way...with rachelle down at paki telling me via cellphone when each bus is leaving, and i will have to say it over the PA system up at konia. tomorrow has a lot in store for us and we are very excited! Also, good luck to Nikki and the other members of our track team tomorrow at their meet! DO WORK!!! (that is how it is physics related).