This week our team approved and ordered hardware components for EMG data collection. Our Bill of Materials is here. We settled on the specific arm movements that will control the game as well as where electrodes will be placed on the forearm. Another success is that the specific data collection experimental protocol has been established and a functional game has been created. A Mock Muscle Controller was created in order to decouple the game dependency on the EMG hardware. This is a significant success because this allows the software development and testing to happen in parallel, and will allow for a smoother integration process. 

One potential risk is that the UDP Receiver Socket constantly receives data in a synchronous infinite loop. This was in part because more documentation and online support were available for synchronous data read, and the asynchronous alternative did not work. Instead this Receiver socket is now running in a separate thread apart from the main game thread, and did some synchronization to communicate with the main thread. We decided to keep this and move on rather than spending time on premature optimization. Apart from this, there are not significant risks at this point, a single electrode worked and we are hopeful to collect data from additional electrodes.

The project is moving forward at an excellent pace and we are slightly ahead of schedule. Next week we’ll be putting together the hardware system and work toward the data collection process while adding additional functionality to the virtual game component, such as character movement and random map generation.