Once our first order of parts was delivered this week, we began soldering and testing various components. For example, Allison was able to set up one of our haptic feedback motors and test it. However, upon testing, we realized that the feedback given is quite faint and could be non-noticable to a user unless the motor is very close to their body or they are wearing a shirt with a thinner material (the person the motor was tested on was in a hoodie). This, coupled with a question we were asked in our Design Presentation about our vest design and component integration, made us question how we would make the vest adjustable so that the IMUs and motors sit as close as possible to the person and provide noticeable feedback. As a result, we spent time this week improving our vest design (and therefore this was a part of our design that was changed this week), considering how we could edit it to make our haptic feedback more easily felt. Therefore, one of our current risks is determining how to design our vest to make this haptic feedback noticeable, but feel we have mitigated it with this initial test, supported by continued testing and vest design iteration where possible. We believe this design change will add no extra costs or latency to our timeline, as we have already built in time for testing and iteration in our schedule. We have ordered two vests, which we plan to edit to construct our current vest design, and are currently waiting for them to arrive.
Next week, we plan to prototype the IMU and MCU setup to gather initial data as a proof of concept for our design. This way, we have baseline information to begin our design and specifications for our Design Report while we wait for our vests to be delivered, and we can then begin further development and integration.