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Francesca Cain’s Status Report for September 20th

This week, I spent the majority of my time preparing for our final project presentation. After Bella completed the slides, I focused on practicing how to deliver information about our project in a way that would be digestible for people unfamiliar with our project, with OCR, or even with ECE in general. I also spent considerable time preparing for our project proposal presentation and anticipating questions that our classmates might ask.

We were asked many helpful questions by our classmates and TAs. One that stuck with me, and our group in general, was about the automation of testing for our OCR text recognition to braille process. Given the scope and number of texts we hope to test, we realized we need to spend more time determining how to create easy, repeatable, and modular testing for various aspects of our project.

After my in-class presentation that day, I spent time researching ways to automate this testing. I believe there are some viable options involving machine learning that I am excited to explore further next week.

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Team Status Report for September 20th

This week, our group spent the majority of our time preparing for our final project presentation. Bella prepared our slides and the corresponding Gantt chart, and Francesca spent considerable time preparing for our project proposal presentation and anticipating questions that our classmates might ask.

In hearing these questions, one issue that arose was the automation of testing for our OCR text recognition to braille process. This led us to think critically about modularization across the various components our project relies upon.

Following our Gantt chart, we have been researching available OCR libraries, the actuation method we plan to use, and the cameras and microcontrollers (like Raspberry Pi) we might use. Though our Gantt chart specifies that we should order these tools this week, through research and discussion with other students, we are considering borrowing a camera and repurposing a Raspberry Pi from a prior class. This would reduce waste and help us maximize our $600 budget.

Next week, and further following our Gantt chart, we hope to finalize our tool selection and move on to selecting materials for printing our labels.