This week all of our parts that we ordered came in and I was able to connect all of them to the RPI. I mainly worked on interfacing with the GPS/IMU. Zach and I think it would be a good idea if we could have something running by the end of this week that would allow us to gather location data while walking around. This way we can walk some routes and save the data so we can simulate walking the route at a later time for development purposes without having to physically be walking the route whenever we want to test.
This brings up the need for some mobile system that includes a power supply and a case to protect all of the components. I should be able to throw together some sort of case quickly, however I need to get the battery ordered. I did some research about batteries for the design report and found this 26800 mAh battery: https://www.amazon.com/Charmast-26800mAh-Portable-Li-Polymer-Compatible/dp/B07P5ZP943. The battery outputs 5v which is how much voltage the RPi runs at, and since our design constraint of battery life is 16 hours, this gives us 8.375 Watts maximum. The RPi uses about 5 Watts at 100% CPU load, and the peripherals will use less than 2 Watts combined, giving us about 7 Watts of power being used. This estimate is on the high end and we may be able to go much lower with careful attention to minimizing power consumption. This battery will give us an estimated 1.375 Watts of slack which is a comfortable amount, especially because I do not want to rely on the battery performing properly at less than 5% charge.
My goals and schedule have somewhat changed from our initial thoughts, with the need to get some real data quickly, I am now focusing more on the construction of the device and the battery. I aim to receive a battery next week and perform some route walks while gathering the location data along the way so that we can do testing/development. I will be somewhat ahead of schedule regarding the battery and device development, however I will be going slightly behind on schedule regarding the wireless communication aspect of the device in order to focus on the location data collection.