This week each of our team members spent most of their time polishing up their portions of the project and now plan to spend most of the remaining time collaborating and working on the routing/feedback features of the device. Colin finished most of the system level work to be able to output audio and interface with the cellular data network while on the go. Zach worked more on the routing/feedback functionality to be able to give good user feedback.
One of the hardest problems that our team is facing right now is the fact that we only have to avoid blind-unfriendly intersections if the user has to cross a crosswalk, otherwise the user could just continue on the sidewalk and turn down a different street. The APIs that we are using right now make it hard to incorporate that feature into our system so we are looking into the possibility of finding some sort of routing library that could help with this problem. As a last resort, our system would still be functionally correct if we did not route the user to these intersections, even if they did not have to cross a crosswalk, it may just create a more convoluted route for the user.
Next week we plan to incorporate the feedback into the physical device and run some simulations to be able to test the routing capability of the device, and hopefully have a device that we could walk a route and get feedback in real time.