This week, I finished implementing the hardware pipeline for sending images from our Raspberry Pi to our Jetson. There were several steps that I went through in order to finish this up. First, I made it so that the Jetson runs a Flask server on startup, so that it can receive the images from the Raspberry Pi through a POST request. I then made it so that the Raspberry Pi camera capture is also run on startup, so that the start button can be pressed to send an image. I also worked with Aditi to set up the stop button, so that any audio description playing from the iOS app is stopped as soon as the button is pressed. I tried to play with the camera settings of the RPi, but will need to further adjust them in order to capture satisfactory images.
My progress is now on schedule, now that we have adjusted our schedule to account for our current level of progress. Despite being on track, there is still plenty of work to be done. The first and most important part for completing our project is to design and print our component case that will attach to the user’s glasses. This must be completed within the next week according to our schedule. If I complete this faster than expected, I will work on decreasing the latency from when the start button is pressed and when the Jetson receives a new image. When designing, we expected that this latency would be much smaller than it currently is, so I will find ways to decrease it.
According to our schedule, in two weeks I will be running the following tests on the hardware system:
- I will measure the latency between when the start button is pressed and when the Jetson receives a new image. This is one of the components of the total latency from when the start button is pressed and when the user receives audio description. The hardware component of the latency was estimated to be about 600 ms, but I did not properly account for the amount of time it would take to actually take an image. However, I do not see this being a large issue as we allowed for multiple seconds of leeway in our use case latency requirement.
- I will measure the total size weight of the device. In our requirements, we stated that it had to be at most 25mm x 35mm x 100mm in dimension, and at most 60g in weight.
- I will measure the battery life and power of the device. We stated that the device should be usable for at least 6 hours at a time before needing to be recharged.