This week as a group we primarily discussed future design goals. Some major topics that we focused on was how we would write the algorithm for the gesture recognition, more precise testing measures, a more in depth flow chart of our device. More design details that we discussed will be on our design presentation slides. Afterwards we worked on the design presentation slides. We also got samples of the sensor that will be on our custom PCB so we can start working on getting sensor data to the Jetson and then to our web application this week. We placed the order for our custom PCB that Edward designed this week as well.
Individually we worked on 3 different areas of our project: the PCB board to collect sensor data, the Jetson Nano, and the 3d modeling interface (Unity Web application).
Joanne worked on getting the Unity section. She scripted one of the three gestures the model should perform when a user inputs our target gesture. We got the rotation gesture (which is the swiping gesture from user) to work. The translations work well when projected onto the holograph pyramid as well. She will be working on finishing up the other two gestures (zooming in and out) this week as well.
Edward worked on finalizing the PCB and testing out the VL6180 distance sensors. He made a small testbench using three breakout boards we bought. The sensors seem fairly sensitive and a pretty fit for our use case. They detect up to around 150-200mm, which fits on a human forearm. Honestly, maybe with some clever math, we can detect finger movements with just three sensors and might not need all 10 sensors. So if the PCB ends up not working out, it might be ok to just use the breakout boards? Will need to explore this further next week.
Anushka worked on setting up the Jetson Nano and looking into communication protocols to implement. This will be helpful later this week once we work on sensor communication with our test sensors. She will be using this information to guide the web application interface throughout this week. She will also be presenting the design review at the end of the week.
The schedule has moved around a lot since last week, and we’ve updated our current Gantt chart to reflect that, as seen below. The team will meet next week to discuss these updates.
Schedule Updates
We haven’t made any major design changes since last week, but we did flesh out what we want the user experience to look like. We will be discussing these during the design review this week. The most significant risk is how the board will work, but this is why we ordered it now so that we have some time if we have to make any changes to the PCB. We will test as soon as the PCB comes, but we purchased single sensors in the meantime so that we can test the general behavior of the distance sensors.