We spent a lot of time together on Zoom this past week for integration and while Heather assembled the physical device. First and foremost, I worked with Edward to edit my audio detection code to be able to communicate with main. Before Heather added in the audio portion of the device, I wanted to make some optimizations. The acoustic location was updating the direction of the speaker far too often — all the readings would be around the same value…
I spent this past week learning about SPI works on the Jetson, configuring the new MCP3008 ADC and the analog mics, and testing the setup. Unfortunately, even after all the research that had gone into choosing the MCP3008 and learning about SPI communication, I found that the MCP3008’s 190kHz sampling rate drops to about 600Hz (so 200SPS per microphone…) in reality. I did my best to maximize the sampling rate, knowing that the primary culprits for the immense slowdown were…
For the upcoming weeks we have given ourselves the deadline to finish up the overall project in the next week and a half. We know that the week after Thanksgiving we need to spend testing and getting results for the final presentation so we need to be done with all of the development on the actual project by then. We will actually start fine tuning and testing the parts that we can this week and at the end of the…
The beginning of this week was a bit of a grind to prepare for the demo. I mostly had my microphones working but found that the microphone delay was a bit finicky. I’ve known that the microphones each have a different amount of delay, and I spent a good amount of time last week figuring out the approximate delay of two of the mics relative to one, then hardcoded this into my acoustic location program. However, when I demoed for…
The plan laid out last week about using multiple I2C mics and a much simpler acoustic location algorithm was scrapped. I actually decided to abandon I2C mics altogether, since the sampling rate was simply too garbage. Instead, I resolved to find other higher-sampling mics and spent the first couple days of the week researching. I found some mini USB mics on Amazon that could sample at 44100 Hz — which is significantly better than the previous I2C mics, by two…
Planning ahead for the next 4 weeks, we have a majority of the integration done along with the passthrough of the video actually getting to the computer. The most significant risk is still the video transmission. We’re able to transmit video over to a host computer, but that aspect still needs work as the current quality of the imaging is nowhere near the framerate that we would like it to be at. In addition, we’re still working through getting the…
Our biggest concern still remains as we try to communicate the video stream from the Nano to a computer. The original idea where we edit the kernel for the USB video protocol was too complicated and we couldn’t figure it out so we transitioned the focus to seeing if we could communicate anything to the computer and found that we could use gstreamer to pass the stream around. With the initial testing we were able to get a connection but…
This past week, I played around with different arrangements and orientations of the microphones. I first tried a very simple linear arrangement with the three microphones, expecting the microphone nearest to me (the acoustic source) to reflect that it had picked up the sound first, but for some reason, it appeared that they were detecting my voice out of order. I’m still not quite sure why this is happening, but it would obviously throw a wrench into my acoustic location…
This past week, we worked hard on writing the remaining pieces of the design report, revising, and adding in figures. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to access the I2C ports on the Jetson. Unlike Adafruit, NVIDIA doesn’t provide a friendly little tutorial to hold your hand through the process 🙁 but I figured out what packages to install and what modules to import, so now I can get I2C input from the mics. My analog microphones…
This week began with finishing up and practicing the design review presentation, which I gave during Wednesday’s class. It went well, but Vyas did point out something that we haven’t given much thought yet, which is how we plan to implement communication between the Jetson and the user’s computer. This falls under Heather’s domain, and she was quick to jump on the research for it. In addition, last week, I mentioned that we could no longer use the four-microphone I2S…