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Project Description:

The current system of martial arts punch training relies on the expertise of a master relying on their subjective opinion to gauge the force behind one’s strike. Sensei Darren Hunter believed there was a way to get a more scientifically accurate reading of force, to numerically track the progression of his student’s punches. He enlisted the help of the Psychic Coders development team to design an app that would provide a physics-based reading of force, and allow students of his dojo to visualize their improvements as they progress through their martial arts training.

Integrated with a customized training bag designed specifically for the application, the Force of a Punch application is made for Android devices, and provides users with new ways to get a visualization of how strong their punch is. Designed with cooperation from professional martial artists, this application is tailor-made for anyone who is looking for the ultimate training companion. The application not only provides users with the ability to numerically calculate the force of their punch, but allows them to record their results, and track their progressions using graphs and high score displays, making it a perfect tool for a single student, or even for an entire dojo.

During the time of working on this project, the Psychic Coders development team gained valuable knowledge and experience in many different areas. Learning to work in a five person team towards a single large goal was a new experience for us. Learning how to develop for Android was a challenging yet enlightening experience. We conducted research in the field of physics, increasing our understanding of it. And most importantly, with the guidance of our client, improving on conducting ourselves as a professional team, working in conjunction with a client, adhering to schedules and guidelines, and being good teammates.

Our progress with this project was excellent, and the team hopes that they have provided the client with a useful product that will allow him to give his students the best training possible.

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Project Description:

Drivemada is the ride-hailing service within Caremada, an application that matches service care providers with care seekers. Caremada exists to address the current market gap for both seekers and providers. As a seeker, it is difficult to find affordable services, and the services offered are often very high-touch in nature, such as nursing and caretaking, and there is no lower-tier alternatives for services such as general accompaniment to the grocery store. As a care provider, the barriers to entry are very high, due to the dominance of premium care services in the market that impose stringent requirements. There are no existing methods for capable care providers to offer slightly lower tier services, where such stringent requirements are not necessary.

As part of the broader Caremada umbrella, Drivermada seeks to match drivers and riders in real-time, and differentiates from Uber by accommodating special needs such as physical assistance to and from the vehicle. If the real-time matching process is successful, the same functionality can be ported to other Caremada services as well in addition to ride-hailing.

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Project Description:

In this project we built and tested green and steel roof models to test and compare results

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Project Description:

POPTikR is a retail tech and business marketing platform, it will help rebuild our economy by offering deals and increasing foot traffic to local businesses. The video should show the information that this app can provide opportunities for local businesses and helps to keep our favourite shops open. We aim to engage with more customers with our promotional videos. ​

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Project Description:

Incuvers is a manufacturer of a smart, biological incubator at the forefront of cellular research. Given the breadth of the field and the many parameters that need to be controlled in this environment, a wide range of peripheral devices are needed to engage in this research.
The Incuvers Hackbox is a device intended to interface with the main product from Incuvers with various end user third party devices. The Hackbox is the end of ad hoc solutions by incorporating the components necessary to operate most, if not all, of the devices typically used in this kind of research. Capable of driving high current loads, the ability to provide variable and constant current to high intensity LEDs, and the ability to power devices up to 24 Volts means that the Hackbox simplifies the work of Incuvers customers. The electronics are arranged on a “shield” that fits over an Arduino UNO. The shield contains all the circuits required to drive LEDs at a constant/variable current, provide voltage regulation up to 24V, power the Arduino, and provide overcurrent protection to the Arduino outputs. They are designed to be run from a single AC-DC wall adapter with a 24VDC output.

Since the Hackbox is built around the premise of user customizability, the software has been kept as simplistic as possible as not to impede on the users capabilities. The python serial communication library “pyserial” is the core of the devices software which allows the Hackbox Arduino to communicate with the Incubators Raspberry Pi. This gives the user a solid starting point to which they can build custom scripts on top of. Some potentially useful use cases are as follows.

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Project Description:

To maintain a sustainable environment, it is important that we take care of it. Fishing nets and other fishing gear continue to catch fish even when they are lost. When this equipment stays in the oceans it can causing leaching of microplastics into the water. The Canadian Government through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) has made it mandatory that when equipment is lost it must be reported. This process currently is not intuitive and is cumbersome.
Marine Way has positioned themselves as a leader in helping keep the oceans clean and have commissioned an Android App (and iOS app later this year) that will make the process for the commercial fishing industry quicker and easier to submit the mandatory forms to DFO. In addition to the mandatory commercial forms, Marine Way has also added to the app the ability for anyone to report found gear, and if the gear has entangled wildlife.
The solution for the Marine Way app became bigger than just an Android app, what was needed was a full stack solution so that their iOS developer would also be able to integrate into the system. For the backend of the system, it was important to find a low/zero cost solution as Marine Way is a non-for-profit volunteer organization. The Team was able to find a scalable no cost cloud hosted server and database solution that will all allow the Marine Way to grow without heavy front-end costs.
The backend solution was also designed to be device agnostic. Not wanting to limit the ability to report the lost gear due to what device people were using the team came up with a plan to create a REST API server so that both Android and iOS devices could push their form data with the same backend solution.
The biggest technical challenge on the Android app side was to solve the issue that the end user will more than likely be out of internet access as the would be in the ocean when they realize they have lost gear. The team came up with a solution that allowed the form requests to sit in a persistent queue until the phone’s internet connection is restored, where all the form requests would then be sent to the sever.
The android app v1.0 was inherited from a previous team that focused on indirect features such as tidal tables, weather, maps and the DFO form came across as a secondary feature. The team needed to pull the DFO forms to be the primary feature ensuring that they were easy to complete and intuitive.
As a team on this project, we realized that it was important to stay engaged with our clients. Even with weekly meetings there was still change and having a strong client bond made changes easier and quicker and ultimately a more satisfied client.

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Project Description:

The purpose of this project was to save time and decrease the manual process of applying the labels to the samples. Originally, Deslauriers Custom Cabinets would hand apply every label and with batches of samples being over 100, this can prove to be a very time consuming task. The automated label applier uses a combination of a thermal printer, conveyor belt, laser position sensor and a stepper motor in order to accurately locate a label onto a sample in a continuous fashion. Once a sample passes down the belt, a laser position sensor is tripped which sends a signal to the Arduino microcontroller. The stepper motor is then turned on the exact length of one label in order to peel the label from its backing at the correct time that the sample passes. The label is then applied with light pressure from a plastic paddle. This project has taught us a lot about how organization and communication is key when working in a team setting in order to make a project successful.

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Project Description:

Our client wanted the team build an animated video describing the multiple aspects of our value proposition, starting from battery manufacturing to building packs and fast charge, describing a fully vertically integrated solution encompassing multiple aspects of the technology at his company GBatteries. This video will help attract more more people in the industry to want to invest in this product.

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Project Description:

SkillsGuild is an android application built on the idea of keeping cultural traditions and skills alive. We want to encourage people with unique skills from all cultures to join and share their knowledge. It is a home for all non-commoditized skills to be shared and celebrated, giving masters of those skills the opportunity to post and manage their class.

The idea of SkillsGuild came from our clients Randy Desormeaux, Simeon Seguin, and Mike Grainger, who were inspired by an interest in the little cultural traditions and skills. “It seems to me that the things that are promoted and shared are things that can turn a profit on their own. That just seems like a shame. Deep historical roots shrivel up and are lost because there is no money in them? I’m a software developer by trade and so I had the idea that maybe one day I could build a platform that allows these traditions to be shared directly and inexpensively by the people who lived them.” – Randy

We started the process by researching the market, users and technology. We went through 3 iterations of design, prototype and testing to create a seamless UI for an optimal user experience. Meanwhile, we also developed a fully functioning API to support the front end of the solution.

With the API ready to support the front end tasks, we built and connected it with Firebase backend technology .

SkillsGuild app users can:

As a Teacher:
Register classes with customizable details
Have full control of registrant status, allowing or denying enrolment
Be notified of new class registrants
Use discussion boards to communicate with all registrants of a class

As a Student:
Explore classes by location, keyword, or category
Give classes a review
Join classes and be placed on a waiting list
Post messages on Class Providers discussion board
Bookmark classes for later access

SkillsGuild differentiates itself from similar platforms by harbouring a variety of unique skills and cultures that are otherwise difficult to find training for. We allow class providers to have control of communications, registrants, and class details. We allow users to explore and sign up for classes, and offer a tool to communicate with providers of the classes they have registered for. We do this all in one spot, the SkillsGuild application currently designed for android.

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Project Description:

The project impacts advancement of propagating energy and water efficient piping system by helping the industrial partner validate the superior performance of new technology—both quantitatively and qualitatively. In particular, the project is enabling College students and professors to perform a range of applied research activities to test, categorize, and benchmark the performance of the company systems against conventional piping materials and their associated installations. The industrial partner has particular interest in assessing energy efficiency, thermal comfort, water quality and usage efficiency, regulatory compliance, product life-time, ease of installation, and ease of maintenance of its systems. The ultimate aim of the project is to help our industry to understand the superiority of PEX technology.

The presented part of the project is the first workstream out of three defined workstreams. This part of project includes actual installation for Hot Water Delivery (HWD) System that was designed and built specifically to investigate water delivery time, water volume waste, water-flow and zero-flow heat loss, as well as the overall energy efficiency of the system. The 30.48 m (100 ft) real-life test system was developed to imitate the layouts and sizes that would be found in a residential condominium installation using Uponor’s PEX pipes, commercially available fittings and outlets to ensure that the data obtained is as consistent with real-world practices as possible.

The results showed UA values of 3.81 W/m.K for flow condition heat loss and rough estimates of 30- minute cooldown times for zero-flow conditions. In addition, the activation of the re-circulation system reduced the usable hot water delivery time by approximately 84% and consequently reduced the wastewater volume by about 76 %. In addition, insulating the system by applying one type of insulation on the external surface of the pipe reduced the usable hot water delivery time by approximately 21 % and consequently reduced the wastewater volume by about 18%. These results suggest that the test systems and methodology that have been created for this project phase is able to provide realistic and accurate results.

Moreover, to find the potential solutions for improving the performance of the hot water delivery system, the further investigations on the impact of running cold water line, using different types of insulation and water-saving valve are developed and in the process of implementation.

The project is funded by NSERC and the industrial partner (Uponor Ltd.) contributing cash and in-kind annually to this project for three years. Uponor is the world’s largest manufacturer of PEX piping with 100 years of expertise in piping and home building. This project is one of only four ARD-2 grants in Algonquin College’s history.

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