Description of preliminary development steps

Team Prayogaya received its eBox 3300 on Aprile 3rd and immediately launched into the development process. The eBox 3300 requires Visual Studio 2005 to be installed as the development environment to develop applications for it. We decided to use Thusira's laptop as the base for our development for the eBox and hence Thusira's laptop will be the computer connecting to the eBox for application upload. The eBox 3300 user manual's instructions were a bit fuzzy and we had some mild problems setting up the eBox 3300 to install its version of Windows Embedded CE 6.0. Visual Studio was all configured on Thusira's laptop, we purchased a USB-to-Serial cable converter to connect to the Serial port of the eBox for debugging, and connected via LAN port to upload the operating system to the eBox. However, what was not included in the instructions was the fact that in order to install the OS, it is needed to connect a monitor and keyboard to the eBox itself. We were able to sort this out with the help of the Imagine Cup Embedded Development forum. Therefore, we managed to install an image of Windows Embedded CE on our eBox and from there on we were ready to go.

When looking at the requirements of our system, it is possible to categorize them in the following manner:

• Connecting computer requirements - These are the requirements with regard to the software being developed for computers to connect to the eBox and submit queries, download and upload data etc. It must be noted here that the software for the connecting computers will be minimal as the associated software design project has not been accepted as an Imagine Cup project, therefore we cannot concentrate too much on this. This batch of software will be primarily developed using C#
1. GUI for students to search for and query educational information.
2. Admin-side GUI to add and remove students, content etc
3. Software solution to process queries and retrieve relevant query results from central educational database
4. Software to search for an eBox connection within range, connect, download queries, upload data relevant to query results

eBox requirements - This batch of requirements is concerned primarily with the software to be implemented on the eBox. This will also be developed using C# within the Visual Studio 2005 environment.
1. Framework to respond to wireless connection requests from computers, and receive data
2. Software solution to store queries, educational information such as text and images while fully utilizing the 512MB storage hard drive of the eBox
3. Framework to select query results based on the requesting school and to deliver educational data accordingly

Team Prayogaya is currently working on the above software solutions. We have hosted our project on Google Code SVN for easier collaboration at this project hosting.

More updates will follow as we progress!

Thank you for your patronage. :)