ENGF0001 Challenge 2

I’m the team lead of my project group and I just like our team dynamics and our work environment.

You might be wondering what “ENGF0001” is. In short, it’s a departmental course (Dept. of Engineering) that first year students at UCL must to take. Currently, I’m working on Challenge 2, which requires us, CS students, to work alongside EEE students. Together, we have to design a circuit and develop a program that enables the user to control the parameters of a small-scale bioreactor.

The bioreactor is mainly made up of:

• Temperature Subsystem (Heater & Temperature probe)
• Stirring Subsystem (Stirrer)
• pH Subsystem (Acid/Base spray & pH probe)
• Control Center (Arduino)
• Data Upload Center (ESP32)

The EEE students mainly focus on wiring the circuit and connecting the components to Arduino, while CS students focus on processing the data from Arduino, pass it on to a device called “ESP32” and upload it to an online Iot platform “ThingsBoard”.

Our group is made up of 6 EEE students and 4 CS students. Among the EEE students, there is a particular student that seems to be very knowledgeable about circuits and the macroscopic view of the project. From our group interaction, he seems to be the main point of reference of the EEE students. On the other hand, I know the big picture for CS part and how to handle the connectivity and the programming of the devices. On top of that, all team members collaborate and help each other out. We would discuss our progress and tackle with challenges and compensate for each other’s shortcoming.

This is the essence of working in teams, which is also why I’m hopeful that our project goes well (still in progress).

Update: currently, we’ve completed the demonstration part of the project. Our team completed the circuit and made the code run smoothly. In the demonstration process, there were some bug that rose, but we were able to solve some immediately. Amongst the other 31 teams, our team is probably one of the most successful ones in the demonstration.

Some Afterthoughts: I believe that this activity was very instructive. It was my first time leading such a big team, and I’ve learned a little bit more about splitting team work depending on each member’s potetials and capabilities. Management is a pretty tough task, because it requires multitasking ability and assigning works to teammates to maximize efficiency. I also believe that the our team’s success is exclusively the effort of all the members. We scheduled meetings outside of class and if they were to be absent or inactive, most likely this project wouldn’t have gone so far.