This week I accomplished everything that I wanted to based off of my prior status report. I wanted to get all of our hardware ordered (except for the battery) so we could begin to experiment with the equipment as well as working out a framework for the software to run on the Raspberry Pi. Zach and I also spent a lot of time on the design review report.
Most of my time this week was spent on developing the software to run on the RPi. My main goal was to come up with a system where all three of our main threads could run while communicating with each other. I decided to add a fourth overall thread to the system which would be the controlling thread. This thread tells the other three threads when to run and handles the data communication. Since we will be using a single process and asyncio in python to be able to run threads, we do not have to worry about concurrency issues when communicating data since only one thread will be running at once. The controlling thread will initially tell the location thread to gather location data, and then put that data into a buffer. Then the second thread that will be interpreting the location data and communicating with the API’s will be called. That thread will be given the buffer to take the location data and then use it to determine what sort of feedback to give to the user. The feedback will then be put into a separate buffer and given to the third thread by the controlling thread. The third thread will then run the text-to-speech engine and output to the 3.5mm audio jack for the user to listen to. This process will continue until the user has reached their destination.
Next week I would like to hook up our components that have been ordered into the physical system. I would like to communicate to the components through the software and be able to gather the necessary location data to be able to know where the user is. I would also like to hook up the software to the blues wireless notecard API to be able to communicate to our external directions API. If I could get all of this done next week I would be on schedule and I would be able to begin to collaborate with Zach in order to start getting the skeleton of our entire system working. We would hopefully be able to have the hardware supplying data to the directions thread which would allow us to work out the next steps to a fully functional system.