The past 2 weeks, the team focused on completing the Design Review Report and also on working on our individual portions of the project. There may be some individual circumstances for team members (Andrew’s injury) that require a change of schedule and responsibilities. This is a risk that we did not plan for but we plan on dealing with by seeing if Alan can help contribute to Andrew’s project responsibility in the immediate future. There are no design choices so far but the schedule will be updated for next week’s status report depending on how things proceed this coming week.
Alan’s Status Report for 10/23
Status Report for 10/16:
Last week, I mainly worked on writing the Design Review Report. I wrote the abstract and sections I, II, III, VI, and VII. I also wrote the OS Interface portions of sections IV and V. I formatted the report and added in my teammate’s contributions and then submitted.
Status Report for 10/23:
This week, I had a meeting with Tamal early in the week to discuss the midsemester quantitative feedback that I received. We talked about the Design Review Report, where I learned that the biggest issue was the lack of figures, which will be something we add for the final report. Additionally, we talked about the future of the project and how I could adjust my own personal contributions. We agreed that the OS Interface portion of the project was not too big of a challenge by itself, and that I should instead contribute more to the other two parts of the project (hand detection and gesture recognition). I was also tasked with creating an OS Interface document illustrating the finite state machine as well as the interface for each functional module in the OS Interface. This includes the calibration step and the running system state. I foresee some scheduling changes that will most likely be included in the next week’s status report due to the adjustment of my responsibilities.
Team Status Report for 10/9
As a team, our biggest focus this week was learning from the Design Review presentations and reflecting on the feedback we received for our own presentation. The team discussed the feedback and how we would incorporate it as we began writing our Design Review report. Currently, as pointed out in our feedback, we do not have a lot of preliminary results so a lot of initial parameters such as distance from the camera and having people in the background will likely be the biggest risk that we would have to work around. As we wrap up our Design Review report in the coming week, we will also begin with creating the hand detection and gesture recognition components and testing them, as we should have our needed AWS credits and camera by then. The design and schedule are still the same although we will provide more details in the Design Review report.
Alan’s Status Report for 10/9
This week, since I was ahead of my personal schedule and with deadlines for the Design Review Report coming up, most of my time was focused on contributing to writing parts of the Design Review Report. I learned a lot from all of the different groups’ presentations and from the instructor feedback and have been working on incorporating suggestions and clarifying points about our project in the Design Review Report. In the next week, I will finish writing my portion of the Design Review Report and then start working with Andrew or Brian on getting their components of the project up and running before continuing with my own OS interface portion.
Team Status Report for 10/2
This week, the team as a whole mostly worked on reflecting on the meeting where we reviewed our Proposal and developing our Design Review slides. Individually, we continued to do our own research into picking specific tools we would use to work on our assigned big sections of the project. Most of our work is independent and mostly done to test out different software or models for when we start developing the actual product. A new risk that was brought up was the amount of time it might take to train our model for gesture recognition as well as the amount of overhead needed to get this connected to our cursor API. This risk may impact our requirement for latency in the long term, but as we have not started connecting components we cannot make preliminary measurements yet. The system design is still the same but we are refining it in our Design Review. The schedule is also fine as it is, but we foresee that after the Design Review we may need to make some changes as we actually start getting into the real production work.
Alan Song’s Status Report for 10/2
This week, I spent most of time playing around with different libraries and APIs for controlling the mouse cursor, as well as working on our Design Review slides. I tested out pywin32, pyautogui, and mouse modules for Python. I found that while pywin32 and pyautogui also provided the necessary functionality for moving and clicking the mouse, the mouse module for Python was the easiest to work with and produced code that was easy to understand with its great attribute naming. Once I settled on using the mouse library, I made some test programs for simple actions such as moving the mouse to absolute and relative positions based on inputted number data (which will eventually be position data received from the hand detection algorithm). The clicking and scrolling functionality was much simpler to get work with and will require input from the gesture detection algorithm to be transformed into simple numerical inputs to trigger the different mouse actions. Additionally, I worked with the team on the Design Review slides, mostly focusing on fleshing out my own section about the mouse module but also participating in discussions with the team about the design overall. I am still on schedule with my own work but after the meeting with the professor and TA this week I think we can modify our schedule a bit to extend harder tasks and shrink the easier tasks instead of just assigning tasks to a 1 week length. In the next week, I will likely be assisting Brian or Andrew with getting one of their components started with development since I am a bit ahead of my own schedule.
Team Status Report for 9/25
This week, our team gave our proposal presentation and reviewed the feedback later on in the week. We started on our individual responsibilities outlined in the schedule with testing out functionality of the hand detection library, exploring datasets for the gesture detection, and looking through documentation for the integration with cursor. It seems like the hand detection library should work very well for us and give us all the information we need to encode hand position as well as potentially gestures. Currently, the biggest risk is still the future integration we are foreseeing between all of our components. There have been no changes to the design and no changes to the schedule as of yet, and we are still comfortably on schedule.
Alan Song’s Status Report for 9/25
This week, my focus for our project was mostly on reflecting on instructor feedback for our presentation and reading documentation for potential libraries we would use for implementing the software side of our project. In class I listened to other presentations and took note of good points and questions that were brought up and asked. I think we have a lot to consider for building our project towards fulfilling more specific requirements. Other teams already seemed to have a good idea of what they would add in their design review, and it gave us things to consider as well. I also looked into the mouse library in python and the win32api library. https://www.thepythoncode.com/article/control-mouse-python and https://codetorial.net/en/pywin32/mouse_control.html. Our project is currently on schedule, and in the next week we are going to finish up our design review and making final selections for every component of our project.
Team Status Report for 9/18
This week, our team finalized our project idea, the Virtual Whiteboard. After submitting the abstract, we met with Professor Mukherjee and TA Tao Jin to discuss our project further. We talked about narrowing down the use case, including more detailed requirements, and the technology we could use to support our design. We discussed the possibilities of using IMU, IR sensors, and CV. After that our team started working on our Proposal slides for the upcoming presentation. We looked into further details for specific equipment and datasets to use for our CV approach. The biggest risk in our project right now is making sure that the approach we chose (CV) ends up working. To ensure things go smoothly, we are continuing to plan out the development of our project through the proposal. The project is currently on schedule.
Alan Song’s Status Report for 9/18
This week, I mainly worked on refining the idea for our Virtual Whiteboard that we presented in our abstract. We met as a team with Professor Mukherjee and TA Tao Jin to discuss our idea. Based on the feedback, I continued to develop and narrow down our use case to be basically just controlling the mouse in a desktop environment through hand gestures and motion. Our system would be able to move the mouse, left click, right click, and scroll just like a normal peripheral mouse would be able to. Along with this, I also developed more justifications for our requirements. Additionally, I began to look into datasets that we could use with a CV approach for implementing our system. I will also continue to work on the Proposal slides with my team before the deadline. Our project is currently on schedule and we plan on finishing our Proposal presentation and giving the presentation next week, as well as finishing the Peer Review.