Mid Term Review

The ORDER proposal and progress

ORDER is a small device that sits on a restaurant table. The guest taps through the menu on a touchscreen, adds dishes to a basket, and sends the order. An ESP32 reads the touches, drives the screen, and pushes the order to the kitchen over WiFi so a waiter does not have to walk back and forth to take it. The whole thing lives in a 3D printed enclosure that stands up on the table and hides the wiring.

My proposal has not changed since I first wrote it up in the Project Management week. What has changed is how much of it is real. The electronics work: I have a milled board, the ESP32 reads the touchscreen, the menu draws on the display, and the order travels over WiFi to a second device. So the core of the idea is proven and the rest of the work is finishing the interface, printing the enclosure, and tying it all together cleanly. I keep the full proposal, the sketches, and the running build notes on my final project page.

System diagram

This diagram shows how the parts of ORDER connect. Power comes in through a USB supply and feeds the board. The ESP32 sits in the middle as the brain: it reads the touchscreen, draws the menu on it, and talks to the kitchen over WiFi. The touchscreen is both the input, where the guest taps, and the output, where the menu and basket appear. The 3D printed enclosure holds the screen and the board together and keeps the wiring tidy. It is the map I use to keep the build organised.

Tasks and their status

Here is an honest list of every task in ORDER and where each one stands right now: done, in progress, or still to do.

Schedule for the rest

This is the plan for finishing the tasks that are not done yet. I gave each one a week so I can see at a glance whether I am on track, and I left the final week light on purpose so testing does not get squeezed.

Meeting my local and global instructors

I sat down with my local instructor here at Fab Lab Rwanda and also reviewed ORDER with my global instructor during the regional review call. We went through the system diagram, the schedule, and my weekly assignments together. We talked about whether the order really reaches the kitchen reliably over WiFi, and how to keep the touchscreen menu simple enough that a guest gets it without instructions.

The clearest advice I took away was to lock the enclosure design early, because once the screen and board are fixed in CAD I can print and integrate without waiting. They also told me to spend less time polishing the menu graphics and more time proving the WiFi link holds up when the lab network is busy, since that is the part most likely to fail in front of people. I moved the enclosure CAD up in my schedule because of this.

Progress on the weekly assignments

As part of the review I went back through every weekly page and checked that each one has its writeup, its process, and its design files, and that it connects to ORDER where it should. The table below is where each week stands, so I know exactly which pages still need real photos or final files added in the second half.

My project management plan

I manage ORDER the same way every week so nothing slips. Each task in the list above is one clear step, and I work through them in the order of the schedule rather than jumping ahead to the fun parts. The riskiest piece, the WiFi link to the kitchen, I keep testing every week instead of leaving it to the end.

I document as I build, not after, so each weekly page gets its photos and files while the work is fresh. I keep my source files and notes under version control and push them up at the end of every session, which means I always have a working copy to fall back to. Every week I look at the task list and the schedule, mark what moved, and move the next item up if something fell behind. That weekly check is what keeps the second half from turning into a rush at the finish.