Month: April 2019

I collected metrics with my teammates this week and also wrote some of the presentation slides. I also worked on gui storyboarding and illustrated most of the pictures that we will use in our new gui.

My goal for the next week is to finish up gui art and help code some of the gui if needed.

The one risk we might face is if our tap detection circuit breaks, we only have one spare sensor left. We hope to avoid this by making sure not to disturb it now that our set up is finalized.

We redesigned the GUI to make it more visually appealing and engaging. Further, we added more sensors to the circuit, mentioned above, to improve our tap detection accuracy over a greater surface area of the poster.

 

Tanu and I soldered four more piezo sensor circuits so that we could reduce the number of taps that were detected as false negatives. This was necessary since we found through testing that our accuracy rate is better when tapping the poster close to the piezo sensors. We are able to achieve 100% accuracy with the new sensor configuration.

We also brainstormed new ideas to make our gui more intuitive and engaging. We then outlined a story board that Suann can use for reference when drawing our final gui designs.

We took data with our working system and compiled our four metrics cohesively. We then worked on the slides for our final presentation.

Next Steps:
We will finish polishing our improved gui, implementing our new design, and complete our poster for the final demo.

We are on schedule.

The following tasks were accomplished this week:

1. Isha and I soldered four more sensors to the tap detection circuit. This pushed our accuracy rate to 100%.

2. Our team also brainstormed ideas to improve our UI and improve our UX.

2. Our team also gathered numbers to validate our metrics.

3. We prepared the presentation slides for the final presentation this week.

4. I will be presenting this time, so I have been practicing for that as well.

Our goal for next week is to make all the final changes to GUI and freeze our final product that we will be demoing next week. We are all on schedule.

I discovered that the tap detection was not sensitive enough while working with my teammates, and assisted with debugging the current system.

My goal for the upcoming week is to add another sensor to the tap circuit for better tap sensitivity. I will also help design the UI to make it more user friendly and colorful.

What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?

We need to improve our tap response rate. We will manage this by soldering more piezo sensors to cover a larger surface area of the poster board.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

No system changes were made.

Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.

No schedule changes were made.

This week I have been debugging the system with Tanu and Suann. We found that most of the latency issues we were seeing were due to using the Mac OS platform. When we switched to using the Ubuntu platform on my laptop, these issues went away. To make this switch, we needed a new way of zooming in and turning off autofocus on the Logitech webcam since this webcam has no Logitech software support for Ubuntu. We were able to bypass zooming in by changing the positioning of our camera and projector. This also helps cut down on a step needed with the initial system setup.

Next Steps:
The main issues we are still facing are the sensor’s rate of response to tapping on the board. After receiving feedback from some peers, we are also prioritizing making the system more intuitive and visually appealing. We will solder together more sensor circuits to expand the range of tap detection on the poster board and work on improving our gui this next week.
We are on schedule.

This week I have been working with my team to debug some of the functionality errors. We made the decision to switch to Ubuntu as our platform  instead of Mac OS; this helped eliminate most of our latency issues. We restructured our code by migrating code between the different classes we created for the GUI. This helped in debugging the other issues we had identified with our system implementation.

Our next tasks would include making the UI more visually appealing that allows greater user interaction/engagement. We also need to increase the tap detection accuracy rate. Currently, the user often needs to tap a few times before the vibrations are picked up by the sensor. We hope to improve this accuracy rate by adding more sensors to our tap detection circuit. Lastly, we need to iteratively test our system and make sure it can be run for a long period of time without fail.  We are currently on schedule.

I discovered several major bugs with my teammates, including extra black screens that happen upon modal closure and really sensitive tap thresholding.

My goal for the next week is to help my teammates figure out tap detection bugs. I will do this by familiarizing myself with PyQt functionality so I can contribute more ideas during debugging sessions.

Thresholding for our tap detection system is currently incorrect. This can be fixed with more testing, especially in our final demo environment. A large risk is the latency of our system, calibration takes a long time and so does modal loading. This will be fixed by trying different QtWidget classes and possibly working on optimizing our detection algorithm.

No changes were made to the system.