Week 15 — Project Wrapped, Testing Report Locked, Draft Presentation Cut

Project wrapped for the Capstone Festival. Testing Report closed, draft narration recorded, README polished. 3 days to submission.

Week 15 — Project Wrapped, Testing Report Locked, Draft Presentation Cut

Project wrapped for the Capstone Festival. Testing Report closed out, draft presentation video recorded against the Phase 5 cinematic clips, and the README got a final polish including an embedded 8-drone highlight GIF. 3 days remain to the Apr 24 deadline — remaining work is rehearsal, portfolio/journal submission, and the v1.0.0-capstone tag.

Milestones

  • Testing Report finalized (docs/project/testing_report.md). Closed out with final metrics tables, figures, and the corrected body-radius obstacle claims promised in the Week 14 “Next” section. Written companion to the narrated presentation video.
  • Draft presentation video recorded. Voiceover cut against the cinematic clips from Phase 5 sub-A — story beats: research question, GNN coordination layer, dropout / obstacle / scale results, what worked and what didn’t. Draft status; one rehearsal/edit pass remains before the final lock.
  • README polish (Apr 21). Embedded a 6s cinematic highlight GIF near the thesis block — source GIF was 19 MB, optimized to 8.7 MB via two-pass ffmpeg palette encode (640×432, 15 fps), clearing GitHub’s 10 MB autoplay threshold so it loops inline without click-to-play. Table of Contents restructured, redundant title line removed.

Next Steps (Week 16, Apr 22 – Apr 24)

  • Final presentation rehearsal + edit pass against the draft video.
  • Portfolio + Learning Journal submission.
  • Capstone Festival presentation (Apr 24).
  • Post-festival: v1.0.0-capstone git tag, changelog close-out, phase doc status sync to Phase 6 Complete.

Challenges

  • GIF size tuning was the only real friction this week — GitHub silently swaps autoplaying GIFs for click-to-play thumbnails above 10 MB, which defeated the “loops inline under the thesis” intent. Fixed with a two-pass ffmpeg palette encode to land under the threshold without visible quality loss.
  • 3 days remain to the Apr 24 deadline — project itself is wrapped; remaining runway is rehearsal and submission, not code.