Author: ryesson

This week was a little slower since our team has been waiting for parts, which I put in orders for on Wednesday. So far we have received our OBDII to VGA cable in the mail via Amazon, and I was able to find my OBDII port on my own car for testing. The wire is long enough for our device to fit on the dash. We also decided  to pivot from our camera idea since it didn’t have enough value for the end consumer. I also solidified which data I was using from the OBDII port so I can target specific sections of the CANBus data string, and came up with a data schema for my part of the project for our final design presentation. I researched more about the makeup of the OBDII string and where the specific data is located, and made some bit shifting masks that we will be using on our Raspberry Pi to find velocity, accelerator position, hazard lights and steering wheel information.

This week, I worked on presenting and preparing the slide deck that we worked on. I worked on the technical requirements slides about navigation and infraction detection, as well as technical challenges and preliminary design. I was a little rushed on the presentation but overall I think I was able to communicate Drivaid’s purpose and technical components. One question that arose was how we needed a GPS tracking device connected to the Arduino that sends info to the Google Maps API to tell if a driver is slowing down for a stop sign/traffic light. I settled on the Adafruit ultimate GPS because of its precision and 10Hz updates, which should be frequent enough for precision mapping and location updates. I worked on a preliminary parts list as well which we plan on submitting to the TAs, which includes the PiCan, cables, GPS, and RaspberryPi. I also started researching how difficult it would be to not use the PiCan2 at all and instead use a OBD2 to USB to hook into the RaspPi’s USB port – we will discuss this as a team either later tonight or tomorrow since it would be a substantial change to our initial design.

This week, I worked on researching the OBD2 port and finding an optimal technical solution to our problem. After shifting from our initial smart heater idea, I thought of this idea as something that built off a past internship that tracked hard braking and turning to improve street design. I helped design our initial outline of which devices we will be using and how they communicate with each other. I was able to find a OBD2 to Bluetooth device that could communicate directly with our onboard Raspberry Pi, one of the port alternatives that we are looking at. I also researched the OBD2 communication protocol to see the feasibility of reading directly from the port, which looks like it can be manageable using correct bitshifting. I also looked at some gyroscopes and IMUs, as Professor Mukherjee suggested, but am still unsure if they can provide the same data accuracy and breadth that CAN data does.