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H4AR Product Pitch

H4AR Product Pitch

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H4AR is a device for assisting hard-of-hearing people in their everyday lives, by visually alerting them about the direction of important sources of sound. The device is a wearable pair of glasses, equipped with an array of microphones and augmented reality through a heads up display. This microphone array will identify human speech, and determine the direction of the sound. This information will be displayed as a visual cue in the form of an arrow on the heads up display, greatly increasing the individual’s peripheral awareness by allowing them to identify and turn towards people talking to them.

You can watch our final video here

Leon’s Status Update for 12/6

Leon’s Status Update for 12/6

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Tasks Accomplished

  • Full integration complete – all parts assembled into a fully functioning standalone package
    • Accessible SWD ports for flashing new firmware
    • USB-C for charging the battery
  • Ran battery test for 12 hours before pulling the plug, far exceeds our target metric

Deliverables for upcoming week

  • Make video and blog post
Leon’s Status Update for 11/29

Leon’s Status Update for 11/29

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Tasks Accomplished

  • Finished assembling the display module and battery/compute modules

  • Put together the wire harness for the mic array to interface with the other modules

Deliverables for upcoming week

  • Finish integrating with the mic array
  • Figure out a way to flash new firmware versions onto the board without taking apart the module
Leon’s Status Update for 11/22

Leon’s Status Update for 11/22

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Tasks Accomplished

  • Finished part iteration of the display module, as well as the design of the battery and compute module. The design now takes a smaller footprint, if we have enough time to spare one more stepping, I can further distribute the parts in the battery/computer module but that seems unlikely as of now
  • Fabricated the display module and battery/compute modules
    • Much higher resolution than previous print, used the form printers this time around
    • Had to start a makeshift isopropyl alcohol washing setup since the parts were not properly washed on pickup
    • Also had to create a makeshift UV curing station since there was not enough sunlight to cure the parts quickly

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Team Status Update for 11/15

Team Status Update for 11/15

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Tasks Accomplished

This week we were able to get 4 mics to work with the board, and are now able to start implementing the 4 mic localization algorithms. We also did some optimization on sampling speed (for the mics) and communication speed (for OLEDs via I2c)

Potential Risks

We ran into many issues in our past week, using up a decent amount of our built in slack time. The biggest risk for the coming week is not being able to get our hardware ironed out. We would like to freeze our hardware and finalize it by thanksgiving, so if we are not able to get a second prototype out, it will slow this progress.

Leon’s Status Update for 11/15

Leon’s Status Update for 11/15

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Tasks Accomplished

  • Work done on iteration of parts, will be fabricating early this week
    • Slower week, was not able to achieve as much due to other work
    • New part will also be fabricated, the battery/compute module holder
  • Improved OLED display software
    • Decreased latency of OLED display from 28.6ms (35fps) to 4.2ms (240fps)
    • Will be looking into non-blocking I2C calls this week

Deliverables for upcoming week

This week I will be finishing up the next iteration of the CAD designs and fabricating them early in the week, likely Tuesday. I will also further look into the OLED driver to decrease latency further, and also start work on integrating the battery.

Team Status Update for 11/8

Team Status Update for 11/8

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Tasks Accomplished

This week we saw the most progress in our hardware, namely we now have physical fabricated versions of our designs for us to devleop with and iterate upon. We also saw some integration work in the display side, with a working driver for the display unit. <More stuff here…>

Potential Risks

Time is again our biggest risk, especially since these weeks are extremely tough with large workloads from other classes. Physical design of the harness and assembly takes time, and so does the printing of the design, making it one of our bigger risks for the upcoming weeks. Integration is looming ahead, and although most of the individual pieces are coming together well, integration requires all components to be ready in order to start. Also, since we have yet to do work on the battery unit, power consumption remains a potential issue down our road, as it requires us to optimize code to save on current draw.

Leon’s Status Update for 11/8

Leon’s Status Update for 11/8

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Tasks Accomplished

  • Fabricated CAD Designs for Display Module and Microphone Array
    • Not enough slack room for some parts, need to iterate for next week
  • Hooked up 4 microphones to the microphone array
  • Finished first pass implementation of OLED display software
    • Lightweight SSD1306 Driver
      • Ran into many issues with data alignment while doing this. Will also be looking into optimizing settings i.e. clock rate of I2C, and also reducing data transfer size (right now I transfer the full 512byte buffer)
    • OLED abstract layer with Bitmaps loaded in

Deliverables for upcoming week

This week I will be updating the CAD designs and sending them off for fabrication again. Once new parts come in, I will have to do further soldering and wiring to hook up the microphones. I will also start work on the battery module.

Leon’s Status Update for 10/31

Leon’s Status Update for 10/31

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Tasks Accomplished

  • Researched documentation on the OLED screens
    • Specifically the SSD1306 Display Driver
  • Successfully tested OLED screens with an Arduino
    • Found key differences between the smaller 0.49″ screen and the larger 0.96″ screen
      • Columns are aligned on different locations in the display driver buffer, have to initialize differently
    • Found error in specs for the small OLED screen, resolution is 64×32 instead of the claimed 128×32
  • CAD design for display module

Deliverables for upcoming week

This week I will be sending off the CAD design for fabrication since many changes were made last week in the design. I will also be working on the display driver and connecting the Mic array to the MCU.

Team Status Update For 10/25

Team Status Update For 10/25

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Tasks Accomplished

This week we were able to start tinkering around with the parts and setting up the groundwork for future tasks. Most notably, we set up our development toolchain (IDE, debug tools etc), soldered up pins to our boards for development, created a base firmware for our project (with peripherals correctly enabled, syscalls handled, basic NVIC interrupts handled) and ultimately was able to flash a working blinky program to our board. Along with this, we also connected up the mic to the board through the DFSDM.

Potential Risks

As we get closer to our interim presentation with our MVP, we are also running a bit tighter on time. The biggest risk for the upcoming week is not being able to get the microphone system set up and a basic data pipeline working, as this will greatly delay our algorithmic development. Another risk comes from the hardware side of things: we are planning on fabricating (i.e. 3D printing) a prototype wearable assembly, however 3D printing is finnicky and prone to possible errors and delays.