This week we spent most of our time on our design review presentation, finalizing parts and design decisions regarding interface communications, etc.  We met a couple times last weekend and once during the week to get these done and help Neeti rehearse.  Yesterday we met again to chalk out our design review report and get some of the things we could do before receiving parts done.  I setup a git repo and made sure we could all push and commit from both Pis.  Then I did some research into datasets available for gesture detection and found these: https://lttm.dei.unipd.it/downloads/gesture/ and http://www.nlpr.ia.ac.cn/iva/yfzhang/datasets/egogesture.html.  Because our gestures aren’t readily available, we might need to manufacture our own (this might not be enough data to train a neural net, but it also might be since we only basically need two gestures).  In our peer feedback, some people brought up the point that CNN might not be the most accurate model to do gesture detection and so I emailed Professor Savvides who taught us Pattern Recognition Theory last semester and would be the best person to advise us on this.  Then, I worked with Shrutika on getting a TCP connection between the Pis working and processing keystrokes using Pygame.

I think we are a little behind schedule because we had aimed to get our manual mode working by spring break, but spring break is next week.  We thought that since we’d ordered our parts last Monday, we’d have them by Friday, but there seems to have been a slight delay in ordering.  We will probably be able to get our manual mode (without gesture detection) working by this Friday if our parts arrive by Wednesday.  If not, I’m hoping we get the parts by the end of the week and then we might be able to realistically get manual mode working by the end of the first week after spring break.

I have two onsites though and will be flying out this Wednesday.  I will try to work on our project (specifically the ML models) a bit during spring break since I’m back on March 10th.  I’m not too worried about us catching up on manual mode, but I do think we have a significant amount of experimentation to do with the microphones and that we should get started on the in parallel in order to save time.