After completing the HCI report, we got many initial ideas for our project. We then started to conduct research and aimed to find some existing possible solutions.

One of the features of our application would be monitoring system information, particularly real-time data of various resources. We first tried and experimented with some default monitors in different operating systems including Windows Task Manager and Activity Monitor on macOS. As our application will be specifically for Linux, we also looked into some terminal-based system monitors such as btop and htop, which provide much information on CPU utilisation, memory usage, and processes.

We kept in touch with our clients and received much support. On 17 Nov, we had a combined meeting with our clients as well as a senior student who had been working on a similar project. In the meeting, we exchanged our ideas on the project and gained much insight into our future work. On 23 Nov, we had another meeting with our clients who came to our campus and brought us the required hardware. They illustrated the Intel 12 Gen hybrid architecture with both performance cores and efficiency cores, and also gave us some advice on how to divide the work.

We also had regular meetings with our TA, in which we reported our progress on technical research; and he advised us to write a literature review to fully understand the project’s requirements and to create a Gantt Chart to manage our development plans.

In the next few weeks, we plan to conduct research on potential technologies and search for possible open-source tools.