Darwin Torres’ Status Report for 2/26/2022

This week, I made additional changes to the screen control interface. Previously, the main functionality that was added was the ability to send a request to the OS to emulate a touch tap. That is, given a pair of (x,y) coordinates, we emulate a finger pressing down and then immediately lifting up. However, these two steps are actually separate events that are sent to the OS – finger down, finger up – we just combined them into one quick event. If an extended period of time passes before “finger up”, Windows applications can register this as a finger hold. Thus, changes had to made so that we can support these touch-specific gestures. This was done by updating the interface to support three requests to the OS: finger down, finger up, and update position. The “update position” allows us to change the position of the finger while it is down, simulating a drag. These requests have been tested using a test script in python and result in successful calls individually, however the drag mechanism still needs to be ironed out. Overall, everything is going according to schedule, and I hope to conduct more testing in the coming weeks as we move on to integration between the hardware, Arduino, and Windows. Once integrated, we can conduct better tests as we will be able to use our fingers to directly interact with the UI. Unfortunately, current tests do not tell us much about usability as everything is simulated without physical interaction, so I am excited about these future steps.