Author: dtorresr

This week, I worked on making our taps and drags more responsive. Before working on double taps, we felt it was best that the we improved the performance of our single-tap interactions. Overall, things were fine for our MVP, however there were a few hiccups, mainly with taps sometimes being registered as small drags and drags not appearing very smooth. Matt K and I came up with a solution where we would ignore additional position updates that occur within a small radius around an initial touch. This makes it less likely that we detect a small drag when the user is really trying to tap. We found that this solution was able to fix our first problem. To make drags smoother, we averaged every couple of position updates before sending a request to the OS. This meant a slower refresh rate, but smoother interpolation of coordinates along a drag. We tinkered around with how many position updates should be averaged, and we found 5-7 gave the best results. Overall, I feel I am on schedule, especially since the tasks that we have remaining are in addition to our MVP. Although I wanted to have a simple double tap test done this week, I felt the changes we made this week were more important to the user experience. Next week, I will work on implementing double taps so that we can hopefully be able to showcase it during our poster session.

This week, with progress finally being made with our PCBs, I worked on updating our touch control interface and tests from the interim demo to be compatible with the final hardware. I also helped Matt S with soldering the final surface-mounted components on the remaining PCB boards. The tests that I developed have yet to be used with the hardware as I need Matt K’s updated code, which he is also updating to match our new environment, to be fully working so that we can check how physical inputs translate to touch controls on the OS. We are currently in the process of debugging our work so that we can proceed with physical testing on the final hardware, and we are aiming to have this done by Monday. With the conclusion of the week I am well on schedule, and overall things have been ramping up recently since we are finally back on track after receiving the decoders. Next week, I will work with Matt K in squashing our final bugs so that we can start testing to not only check the robustness of the software and hardware, but to also record relevant data to compare against the requirements we set in our design review. We will start by testing physical input along one dimension, which we already have the hardware ready for. This is essentially a scaled up version of our interim demo tests. Once the second axis is ready, we will test touch controls along both axes, which would be a major milestone as this will give us the capability to interact with any point along the 2-dimensional space of the screen.

This past week, I helped the team in preparing our interim demo. The integration of subsystems B and C has been going well so far, so Matt and I designed some visual tests to showcase in the demo. Unfortunately, our decoders have not arrived, so subsystem A has yet to arrrive, but we were able to perform some initial “physical” testing with a breadboarded circuit. This allowed us to test our code that sends signals to the LEDs and processes signals from the photodiodes. Tests were successful, and we were able to set up a simple demo showcasing how interacting with the LEDs results in onscreen manipulation through emulated touch inputs. It was good to know that my code had integrated well with Matt’s. There are still a few bugs and problems present, most notably with the precision of our setup, but it will be hard to measure this accurately until we have the PCB completed. In terms of my software-related tasks, I am on schedule. Unfortunately, we have delays with the hardware, but we should be up to speed soon. Next week, Matt and I will work together in debugging our code. Once the decoders arrive, we will work together in completing the PCB so we can test subsystem A and get it ready for integration with our software. If I have extra time, I will start investigating multi-finger functionality within Windows.