Category: Frances’ Status Reports

This week, I worked on finally getting the hardware off of the breadboard and into our casing. I required all of our connections using female-to-female jumper wires, and attached our battery which finally arrived. I also prototyped 3 versions of our hardware casing out of foam-core, adding an openable flap, so we were able to reset the Arduino and disconnect the battery. The hardware casing also included an IMU pocket, so that it wouldn’t jostle around and potentially skew the data while the users were playing the game.

We are on track to have a successful demo. This upcoming week, we will work on the final report and video.

This week, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to make the hardware wireless. We had previously attempted to communication with the Arduino Nano through CMU’s Device WiFi, however this had proven to be especially complicated, since it was difficult to connect the computer to CMU-Device, and both the computer and the microcontroller needed to be on the same network in order to communicate.
As a result, we have successfully implemented a WiFi communication using hotspot, where both the devices are connected to the hotspot. This was a very critical step in our project, and I verified the correct communication by powering the microcontroller with a different power source.

For this week, I spend a majority of time trying to wire the ToF sensor. I was having lot of compilation issues, where the Arduino IDE imported libraries weren’t fully supported with the ToF sensor we specifically chose.

After a bit of tinkering, I found that the specific sensor we purchased was unable to communicate via SPI to the Arduino Nano, although SPI is supported on other models of ESP32 microcontrollers. As an alternative, we are able to use I2C to wire up the ToF sensor. The drawback with using I2C is a higher latency, however the distance the frisbee is off of the ground does not need to have a high sampling rate, therefore making I2C a suitable communication protocol in our use-case.

This week, I was able to successfully get data communication between the Arduino Nano ESP32 that arrived and the IMU. I wrote some test Arduino code that just printed the acceleration and the angle of tilt, and I successfully used SPI communication protocol to transfer the data between the sensor and the computer. Next week, I will get the ToF sensor working, and have the Arduino able to communicate with both sensors.

This week, I spend a majority of the time working on the Design Report. We further fleshed out in detail the decisions we were making, such as the battery we chose to select as well as the hardware implementation and data calculations we would need to do in order to successfully implement the project.
Next week, I plan to play around some more with my Arduino UNO, and get the basic Arduino code setup done to test the sensors. We are doing all of our data calculations in a python program, so I will also attempt to create a slower Arduino version of those calculation to ease the workload of my group members.

This week, I worked on the design presentation and specifically focused on the hardware implementation solution plan. I continued my research on the ideal parts, and started tinkering with my personal Arduino UNO. I also picked up the RPi we will be using, so in the following week, I plan to set up the wifi communication between the two of them to get some baseline wifi latency measurements. This next week, I also plan to spend a lot of time writing our design document. Once we have the feedback from our design presentation, I will go ahead and order the important sensors for our project.