Colin’s Status Report for 9/24

This week I did research about all aspects of the hardware for the project. I wanted to tie in all of the components at a high level and see how they would all interact together in the project. In particular, I have decided to go with a BMA180 accelerometer to feed in data into the Jetson to determine if the user is stationary or walking. I can use a python library for this particular accelerometer to get the data, or I can write a small c program to gather the data and run some algorithms to determine the state of the user. I figured it would be nice to be able to easily gather the data using python given that we will be using python for the object detection portion of the project, and that the data from the accelerometer must be communicated to the object detection portion. I believe that doing both of these in the same python code would significantly increase both robustness and speed of development. I have also been looking into cameras that can stream data to the Jetson, and I believe that the SainSmart IMX219 would work well with a Jetson Nano, which is what we plan on using. Currently, I am on track according to the schedule given that for now all of us are working towards the design proposal, and the work that I have done this week all has to do with the design of the project on the hardware side. My primary goal next week is to look into the options involving the audio communication to the user of whether or not they should cross the street and what direction to go. I would also like to receive a Jetson Nano within the next week and start to install python/OpenCV on it. When installing python, I would also like to look into the option of building a multi-threaded python program to be able to get the accelerometer data at regular intervals and to communicate that data to the thread that decides whether to look at the walk sign detection or the crosswalk detection.