This week we ordered several parts, including the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (x2), got the cables necessary to connect them, formatted the SD cards that will go into the Pis once we get them, and put NOOBS on them. We met with a mechanical engineer friend who gave us advice on how to design the physical platform we are building, and connect all of the sensors. We also set up our website!

The most significant ‘risk’ we identified this week is lack of time … we definitely thought that we would have more weeks than we actually have. As we have been deciding on/ordering parts, we realized everything begins later than expected when factoring in time for ordering, receiving, and setting up parts.

One design change we made after talking to our mechanical engineer friend is the physical part that holds the phone up will have to be more advanced than we thought – originally we were thinking of just having a slot where the phone sits, but we realized that would block the phone mic, and not fit all types of phones. Instead we’re considering ordering or making a clamp-type-thing (kind of a selfie stick holder) or a GPS phone holder for cars. We considered a few types a motors (including a microwave motor) but most likely will stick with the motors we used in embedded. This will primarily take more time than we expected, but doesn’t incur many monetary changes.

Another major change we realized after talking to Prof. Sullivan is that we can take advantage of the fact that we’re using motion/camera detection in the ‘auto’ part of our project. Instead of relying completely on microphone input and array processing to localize the sound, we can use the visual input in addition to sound to say “that’s a head – stop there!” This also will affect time taken (but actually shorten instead of lengthen!)

We mainly realized that our schedule is ambitious (haha) and we may have to use our slack time in the schedule earlier than expected. We’re still going to try to get manual mode working by spring break, but definitely have to put in more time each week than we expected. As we create our design documents we may shift the schedule as appropriate, since we’re delving deeper into exact implementation details.

No photo or bragging rights yet … coming soon 🙂