This week I worked on the entire pipeline from the frontend notes or websearch to the arduino controlling the solenoids which consisted of a lot of time spent on figuring out how to communicate between the rpi and arduino over serial. I also changed the actual code of how it was translating signals from the lists of combinations to make it more efficient and I debugged some translation issues since our goal is to get it to 100% accuracy. I started debugging and integrating the backup google search feature as well as working on a button that talks directly to the rpi in order to decide things like uncontracted vs. contracted braille and jumbo vs. normal text size based on user feedback.
Zeynep and I visited LAMP on Tuesday to get participants to meet with us 2 weeks from now for a more in depth user testing session and also to get basic feedback which helped us improve usability and also realize the parts that were working well like how easily apple’s existing voiceover function allows users to figure out our website.
In the next week or so, I plan to webscrape backofthebox.com and integrate it with the currently functioning database so we have a larger database. I also plan to finish work on the google search function so that it gets the important information from the searches and not just the entire html. I plan to implement a cache with the 100 most recently searched products. Lastly, I plan to create a file that stress tests the translations. Right now, I have a random generator for me to test one at a time and compare but I would like to have it automatically compare against existing websites that translates characters to a braille image. I am currently on schedule and wrapping up everything I need in order to meet our goals for this project.