To start off the week, I spent a good deal of time practicing and preparing for my proposal presentation. I refined my talking points to make sure it would fit into 12 minutes, as it was originally sometimes 15!
Having given the presentation, I spent the rest of the week researching sensor options. In my sensor research, I learned that you can only hook up a single MPU6500 combined gyroscope accelerometer to a Arduino at a time(there is perhaps a way to communicate multiple over the bus, but this is beyond my current analog device knowledge). With this limitation in mind, I decided to start looking at bluetooth enabled sensor units instead. This led me to two options, the MBIENTLAB MotionRL sensor for $110 per unit, and the WITMOTION sensor at about $50. While the WITMOTION sensor is cheaper, the MBIENTLAB sensor has much better documentation, and has clearly been used in developing other applications. It also includes a magnetometer, which prevents angular velocity drift. I believe this will be helpful in limiting potential data collection errors later on. It also provides a much larger range of support than the WITMOTION sensor, allowing for low power consumption modes, and a battery life of up to 14 days. For this reason, I currently believe it is the clear choice. I am not currently behind schedule. Next week, I intend to actually order the sensors, as well as begin writing some code to communicate with the sensors so that once they arrive I can immediately begin experimenting with their functionality.
Link to reseach doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jEEZFMm4V-nKgTUkH4GX_SufVJgoKhpiRbq81Mextvg/edit