Edward’s Status Report for March 19

One of the largest risk factors we had were the PCB’s not working. Before Spring Break, both our PCB’s (sensor board and support components) came in. I mocked up a rough prototype on a breadboard with both PCB’s but it didn’t seem to work. The I2C communication on the sensors was very wonky so the Photon wasn’t always able to start up all the sensors. So, after tinkering for a very long time, I eventually removed the support components PCB and ended up manually wiring up the sensors PCB only (see diagram below).
This actually ended up working! So, apparently I didn’t even need the support components board… But, the good new is, our hardware works now! The wearable is coming along well.

After writing come code to control and read from all 10 sensors as a test, I soldered the PCB and the resistors to a perfboard (see diagram below). I also added a battery.

(Eventually the Photon will go behind the resistors closer to where the blue wires are, making the form factor smaller. I will also get rid of the yellow breadboard and solder the device directly to the perfboard.)

I wrote code to stream the sensor data over MQTT and modified our visualization program to view the data in real time. I also recorded some data to be used to test out finger detection and gesture recognition algorithms.

By some stroke of luck, I am ahead of schedule, as I anticipated to be debugging and redoing the PCB’s. My next steps are to help Anushka on finger detection and gesture recognition on the Jetson.

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