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Danielle’s Status Report for 02/27

This week, I worked on getting our project proposal presentation ready and researching some of the justifications for our metrics. Since I am assigned to work on the vibration device for our project, I found a couple tutorials (links listed below) for using a Grove Vibration motor with a Raspberry Pi. Going through these tutorials, I tried to assess the code and see the basis of what I will have to do in order to create a successful vibration device. I do not have much experience with RPi, so I will be researching similar tutorials to begin planning the design. I was able to also find a circuitio page that shows how to properly connect the vibration motor to the RPi, so I believe this will help when we begin constructing the project.

I would say that the group is on schedule. We have discussed our plans following the proposal presentation and have reassessed some of our design plans which we wish to discuss during our meeting on Monday. We also wish to begin ordering supplies at the beginning of this week to truly begin working on the project. As for my own progress, I would say that my progress is slightly behind schedule. I spent some time researching, but I hoped to put in more time this week. To catch up, I will spend the next couple of days focusing my efforts on researching and preparing for the design report.

In the next week, I hope to have the design report and presentation ready fairly early so we can focus on editing as needed. I will be giving the Design Presentation, so I will be spending time practicing to ensure that everything goes smoothly and that our research is solid to justify our design and metrics.

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Team Status Report for 02/27

The most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project is that, based on professor feedback from our proposal presentation, we have decided to use the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX Developer Kit instead of the Nano as previously decided. The biggest risk associated with this is the cost, namely that it costs $399, which is significantly higher than the Jetson Nano which was $99. This eats into our overall budget pretty heavily and does not allow room for any mistakes to occur. If, for some reason, the Xavier were to somehow become usable, we would have to re-evaluate how to proceed with our contingency plans. To lower the risk of damaging the Jetson Xavier in some way, all of us will educate ourselves on how to properly handle it. We will also be storing it at Danielle’s apartment since the carpet in Heidi and Vaheeshta’s apartments pose a significant ESD risk, as well. Our current contingency plan is to try to find a cheaper, used Jetson Xavier option on a resale website such as eBay. We will discuss with our TA, Abha, about any other suggestions that she may have for contingency plans.

We have made several changes to the existing design of the system, following our Project Proposal presentation from Wednesday. We met to take into account the feedback that we received and think about how it would affect our project. As stated above, we have decided to use the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX Developer Kit instead of the Nano. We have also decided to adjust the scope by removing eye detection as one of our requirements, since it combines with facial detection, and instead using DLib 68 points landmarking. We also intend to look into adjusting our landmarking accuracy by researching more based on Professor Savvides’ comments following our presentation.

None of our changes have affected the schedule of the project, so there are no updates.

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Danielle’s Status Report for 02/20

Throughout this week, I have been working on the Project Proposal presentation, specifically on the use case, problem statement, and technical challenges slides. I have met various times with my team to discuss the project and make determinations about how we plan to proceed with the project. I spent a lot of time making sure that our presentation was visually appealing and added the themes and images. One aspect of our project that will be a challenge for us is the timing and differentiating between normal driving movements and distracted driving. While I was driving home this weekend, I was monitoring my own driving techniques and assessing how long I was checking my blind spot, etc. to help make determinations about how long people look away from the road in order to change lanes or turn. I also spent some time doing research about the timing on the internet.

I believe my progress is on schedule for the project. I have been putting in a lot of time to make sure that our presentation was professional and portrayed our project well. We have already finished our presentation and will be meeting today and tomorrow to practice presenting and making small adjustments, so I believe I am on track currently.

In the next week, I hope to research more about timing than I did this week. I also hope to make a more concrete determination about the vibration device that we intend to use as an alert system for the driver, so we can begin to order parts, as well as for the bluetooth wireless capabilities.

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