Matthew Kuczynski’s Status Report for 4/16

This week was difficult for me because I had COVID, so I was unable to meet with my group and did not feel good Monday – Wednesday. However, I was able to make significant progress on the software at the end of the week. My primary goal was to finish the Arduino script, which I accomplished, however it has not yet been tested due to some issues with PCB that existed until about an hour ago. Additionally, I wrote the new Python serial script, so the arrays of photodiode values can be communicated to the Python side. Previously, we had decided that the photodiode values should be communicated as a set of bit-encoded integers rather than a string to improve speed. Since the maximum integer size is a 32-bit long, three were needed since we have a 56 by 31 array (two with 28 for the top and one with 31 for the right). I also developed a protocol to know which values is being sent, which is to send either a -1, -2, or -3 before each value based on which of the three longs it represents. Since we never use all 32 bits for our longs, these negative values should never appear as the encoded photodiode values. Overall, I believe that I will be able to finish the testing in time, so I think that I am on schedule as long as I put enough work in this week and there are no more major hardware issues. Next week, I will debug my Arduino script, the Python serial code, and then work on multi-finger functionality.