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Abby’s Status Report for Nov 1

This week I focused on ordering final components needed to complete the demo. In addition, I started sending 3D prints to TechSpark to be completed. I continued to work on the CAD for other aspects of the design. I altered our design a little bit. Instead of a cam rotating to act as the “printing” mechanism, I moved to change this to a circle with a small cut out. By making it a circle instead of a cam, I hope to keep the design more balenced and easier to design and print out.

We are on track for our goals of what we want to show for the demo. By the end of this week, I hope to have the servos running with the RaspberryPi and a completed first mock-up of the embosser.

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Francesca’s Status Report for November 1

This week, as mentioned in the team report,  I continue to experiment with Tesseract, which is important as it’s the main way in which we hope to use OCR to read an image and convert it to braille. The data sets I was experimenting with last week has proved difficult to use in terms of cursive script, so I have been trying to find other, more helpful data sets to experiment with. I will also begin to venture into the real world, taking images of actual labels (medicine bottles, prescription bottles, cereal boxes, etc) to test with Tesseract. I believe my progress is where it needs to be.

In terms of software, this week I will also begin to write the logic to “convert” each English recognized character into actuator pin movement that embosses the braille lettering. For instance, here’s the letter A in Braille:

Logically, I need to tell Pin 1 to engage, Pin 2 to disengage, and Pin 3 to disengage, and emboss the first column. Then, I need to have the tape move over slightly, and tell Pin 1 disengage, Pin 2 to disengage, and Pin 3 to disengage. This is the process for each character. I will think thoughtfully about how to easily modularize this process in my code.

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Team Status Report for November 1

This week, our work has slowed slightly, but we are still on track! On Monday, Francesca did not attend class, since she was attending the AIMBE Public Policy Institute, which provided interesting insights regarding the ethics of bringing a device similar to ours to market. Abby and Bella participated in ethics day, and had great discussion about potential pitfalls of our product, especially how errors, whether through misprinting or mechanical errors, harms the patient/client.

Our team was able to order the components necessary for us to build our final project, which is very exciting! Abby has continued to iterate upon our CAD design files, and is planning to begin 3D printing components this coming week. Upon printing some components, we will begin to have a physical, tactile representation of our work, and more easily make any needed tweaks once we have it in our hands. Francesca has continued to test Tesseract– she has had some difficulty with the data sets she chose last week, specifically with those that include cursive, but continues to make progress and will research more photo or document sets for our team to try. Bella was unfortunately sick on Wednesday but continued working on our designs from home.

We have not identified any new risks this week that were not previously identified. No changes to the design were made this week, but may occur next week as mentioned, depending largely on the results of our 3D prints. No updates to the schedule were identified.