Setting Up for Success

Content:

- Setting of Clear Project Parameters

- Learning of New Skills and Languages Necessary for Project

- Planning of Project Framework

Process:

Due to the Technopreneurship courses in the previous weeks, my team has not made the effort to embark on our project proper. We hence took the opportunity this past few CID lessons to put up clear parameters for the objectives of our CID project. The setting up of this scope can help us ensure that we remain on task during the course of our project and have a clear goal in mind. With the planning of our project parameters and framework, we were also able to get a clear overview of the workings of our Offline Database Server.

Our Offline Database Server mainly consists of two parts, the Wifi Hotspot and the Server (including the webpage). We hence decided on such a framework for our project to run on in the end.



We planned to use Host Access Point Daemon (HostAPD) for the setting up of the Raspberry Pi as an access point. This access point would allow users to connect by WiFi to the Raspberry Pi, hence being able to access the webpage in the server through entry of the IP address of the Raspberry Pi in the browser.

For the server, we planned to use of a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) Server. On the Linux operating system of the Raspberry Pi, we would the Apache HTTP Server, a web server software 90% of the world's webpages run on. We would then install MySQL for a database, and PHP as our server-side scripting language to handle data storage in our databases.

For the webpage hosted on our server, we would use HTML for the basic framework of the webpage, and CSS for the visual style of the web interface. Reflection: Upon the deciding of our project framework, we immediately understood the level of difficulty that it brought. The use of HostAPD was something we had never come close to using before, and there was a lot to understand about implementing the HostAPD: the initial hardware requirements and the process. The use of LAMP was also new to us. We were completely new to setting up of a server, as well as the maintenance of a database and the PHP programming language. Even HTML and CSS had to be learnt from scratch. This was definitely a whole new challenge for us -- in all sense of the word. We have a tough journey ahead, but a great journey of learning too for sure. Personal Development: I immediately set up to compile a list of book and online resources which would help me pick up the new knowledge necessary for the project. I decided to mostly use online resources such as W3Schools to pick up knowledge as online resources are far more versatile and convenient, even offering quizzes to the students to test their abilities. Books from the library, on the other hand, can only be held for 3 weeks and cannot be constantly used as revision as reference after use.