I have been playing with the microphones this week.

Turns out that macOS Catalina doesn’t support Audacity, and then I tried to connect to an old laptop but the USB ports were broken, and had some other adaptor issues… also it’s super unclear if the mics are directional or omnidirectional (the manual says both somehow).

I gave up on Audacity for now (might try to go back to it later if I do end up needing baffles) but currently am trying to figure out how to measure amplitude in pyaudio. I was able to plot the wav files in Matlab and it seems like the mics are picking up pretty different amplitude of sounds without even adding on baffles, just from being turned in different directions. If once I figure out how to compare volumes with pyaudio and start testing they’re not accurate enough, then I’ll try to play with graphing/testing baffles more.

Our hand gesture detector is getting there – we’ve taken tons of pictures of people’s hands this week, and the latest check when Neeti ran it, we were at 90.36% accuracy!

This week was our first week of virtual meetings. Definitely an adjustment, but I think we have a solid plan going forward. We’re definitely rushed for time since we lost a few weeks with restructuring project virtually and waiting for our parts to ship, but I think now with an actual schedule in place for the rest of the semester we’ll be able to refocus and complete our project.

This week we figured out how to restructure our project and actually put it down on paper. Working on the Refocus SOW helped us think through the pieces as well. We did some research and found a dataset of hand gestures that will work for our manual mode. This week, my next steps will be figure out how to virtually make our platform and have it be able to receive inputs and rotate in the correct direction.

In all I think my group is pretty optimistic that despite the challenges we’re facing this semester we’ll be able to complete our project.

This week I spent a lot of time being able to ssh onto the Raspberry Pis. There’s a lot of guidance online but it differs by network, especially since we wanted to use the school network, and a lot of them assume you have all of the cables necessary at your disposal. We figured out that by plugging into a router (which I ended up doing from home) you could get the MAC address and then registering on CMU-DEVICE instead of CMU-SECURE worked best. This also didn’t work for a while and I have no idea what changed (maybe just took a while to register the address on CMU-DEVICE) but eventually we were able to ssh into both pis.

I think progress in terms of what I personally planned to do in the next few weeks is slightly behind, because I was supposed to work on making the physical platform this week, but I think now that the pis are set up the next week or 2 will be easier to split up work between the 3 of us. I think some of what I was scheduled to work on these few weeks are flipped, but we are still on track for our first major ‘deadline’ that we gave ourselves – having manual mode work by spring break. Doing certain things first instead of the way we planned it was just a result of factors like waiting for parts for come in, and who was available when.

In the next week I plan to get the pi-pi communication working – I don’t think this should take too long but we have been underestimating the time it takes to do everything..if I have time I also want to make a platform that we can start to attach things to. Especially once we have our motor it’ll be easier to visualize what the device should look like. I think I’ll end up working on the pi-pi communication and Neeti and Gauri will get the motor working, since they did something similar in embedded and I’ve done things with networks.