Author: xiaoranl

Team_A2_Lin_Cao_Zhang_final_report

This week, I have primarily focused on fixing physical connections and making sure that everything works fine. We now have a second battery that we plan to attach to the depth camera so we have more battery life to support both the camera and the raspberry pi. I have also planed out some exterial design, we will be cutting out a piece of black table cloth to cover up large electronic parts such as the raspberry pi, the arduino, the breadboard etc. Since our project is supposed to wearable, we will spend some time next week to make it visually attractive as well.

I am currently also working on a python visualization code for the belt. The python code will communicate with the raspberry pi on an usb chord using serial communication, and naively receive inputs and visualize the information. I have yet to decide what additional features I want to add to help us demo the belt, but at the moment I am planing to display the reading for the six sensors, the vibration level for the six vibration motors as a starting point. Passing in depth camera information might be difficult since frames would take a lot longer to process then numbers, and it might slow down the raspberry pi which is not what we really want.

Next week, I will be finishing up the python visualization, finishing up our external decorations, and conduct more testing to make sure that our project would perform well .

This week, I have been focused mainly on restructuring the belt and reassembling the belt. This includes making a new protective cover for the ultrasonic sensors, reconstructing all of the circuits and checking all of the components out again to make sure nothing is wrong. Examples of assembly can be seen below:

Front of the belt and back of belt (Yellow space is reserved for inserting depth camera)

Sample of circuit assembly

We were able to run some tests, and all of the sensors are working correctly. Tmrw we will conduct tests with all modules installed.

As for next week, I plan to finish up the visualize palrts and add decoration to the belt. Covering up more of the underlying structures and adding design to fit the bat theme

For this week, our team has been focused on making sure that the core algorithm ran in the raspberry pi would function as expected and correctly evaluate incoming risks. We are mainly focused on processing the information from the depth camera. For more detailed information on this, check Kelton’s blog.

The other aspect is the information from the ultrasonic sensors. We tested out our machine in a regular lab environment, to see how well it would respond. So far the stats from the ultrasonic sensors seem quite stable. We did not make much change to the core algorithm behind processing the sensor data, only a few minor bug fixes here and there. Overall, the prototype belt has met our minimal expectancy in a select settings. We have yet to fully test out its functionality, which we hope to focus more on next week.

For the physical belt assembly, we are currently waiting on new materials such as foam casing for the ultrasonic sensors, shorter female jumpers for rerouting the circuits, and tape covering for exposed wires. We will finalize our assembly next week.

In our final week before the presentation, we would rebuild the physical belt one last time to make sure there are no component failures and everything is well organized. Then we would test out our belt and make any minor adjustments as needed. We will also add a new feature to visualize our belt’s functionality so we can better display our product.  Our team has agreed to finish up other dues over the weekend so we can focus on testing throughout next week and especially over the weekends. So far we are expected to meet our goals before the presentation.

This week, I have mostly been doing some preparation work for finalizing our project in the final week. I have ordered some new parts to help rebuild the belt. Currently I am still waiting on the parts to arrive before I reroute the circuit. But I have tested out the individual parts and ruled out components that are broken (since vibration motor disks and sensors are quite cheap, they can be quite unrealiable). I have done some basic testing to make sure that the ultrasonic and vibration sensors work as expected, and only need to wait on a few components to finish up assembling the final form of the belt next week.

Apart from the belt, I am also looking into developing a visualization system for the belt’s functionality. The basic idea is to feed the processed information from the raspberry pi to another PC through USB. I would hope to include both the video feed from the depth camera, as well as the information from the sensors. The visuals would indicate how the belt is producing effective warnings and how it is recognizing risks, so that observers can understand the belt without having to put it on. This would help us demonstrate the belt much better.

Next week, I will look to finish up on the two points above, and transition to testing before the weekend.

For this week, I was focused on adjusting the physical model for the belt and fixing the arduino interface. Following last week’s progress, I have completed a working prototype that consists of most of the components we need other than the battery and depth camera. Furthermore, I have adjusted part of the arduino interface to allow for a faster response rate from the ultrasonic sensors.

Later on this week, I have not made too much progress in face of carnival, but in the following week, I plan to reroute most of my circuits, as well as replace some of the parts that I found to be malfunctioning. I will also add a attachment mechanism for the depth camera as well as the battery.

This week, I am primarily focused on the physical prototype for our belt. We wanted to put a model of the belt together before we conduct more software testing. Using myself as a user, I have planned out the placing of our components on the belt. This mainly includes the ultrasonic sensors, vibration units, arduino board, breadboard, raspberrypi, depth camera and the battery. Overall our sketch seems to be valid. So far we have attached all of the sensors as well as the vibration units and arduino board and breadboard. A rough image of what the board would look like is included in the team report.

I will try to finish up the connection on Sunday so we can demo our current progress on Monday.

A minor arduino adjustment this week was I changed the rate in which the arduino interface sends signals to the raspberry pi. Instead of sending a data for each sensor we operate, we would be doing so for every cycle of  6 sensors.

Moving on, we would primarily focus on software testing. We are also considering improving the physica modeling to hide more of the circuit. The exact way to do this is still under discussion, but will likely be decided after our physical prototype is all complete.

This week, I mainly focused on testing the system together with kelton, and made sure that connections between the arduino and the raspberry pi were working as expected. So far, the interface seems fine and we would need to move on to more testing to make sure that our threat detection are working correctly. I also started making physical models and developed circuit connection schemes that we will carry on next week.  Moving on, we will start to assemble our physical belt together first, and conduct software testing from that point onward.

 

This week, we focused on testing the multiple sensor and vibration system, made progress on how the depth camera identifies ground level threats, and started to make physical parts for assembling the belt.

For the sensor and vibration system, we have finished developing both the arduino interface to communicate with the sensors and vibration units, as well as the python interface on the part of raspberry pi. After some basic testing, the serial communication works quite well, and we were able to operate the system with multiple sensors and vibrators active at the same time. We have  developed a basic threat determining model in our python code, and conducted some testing to ensure that the system operates as expected.

In the testing process, we also realized that our vibration unit cables were extremely thin and fragile, and may not satisfy the requirements for a wearable device. Therefore, we decided to order new models for the vibration units that were a little more durable. We have also started to develop protective cases for our arduino board and breadboard circuits. Since we now have a finalized circuit connection model, we can simply build our circuits and continue our software testing without ever having to modifying the circuits. We plan to purchase existing arduino protection cases from amazon and use laser cutting and acrylic boards to build a custom case for our breadboard.

For detailed updates on the depth camera development, please see Ning’s report.