Updates
Block diagram updates
This week, I identified more specifically what sensors and communication protocols we will be using for our device. I also worked on the wiring between the different components and microcontrollers — illustrating how many wires we would actually need between components. I updated our block diagram to reflect this:
Communication Protocols
For the accelerometer, we found from the MPU-6050 IMU datasheet that it communicates using the I2C protocol. For communication between the ESP32 (gloves) and the Raspberry Pi (compute module), we originally only said that we were communicating over Wi-Fi but we had not yet thought about what protocol we would be using to communicate. I researched into what protocols were common for high-frequency updates from IoT devices and found the MQTT protocol to be the best fit for our setup. MQTT works similar to various other pub-sub systems while minimizing communication overhead. Moreover, there are existing MQTT libraries we can use for the ESP which can connect to an MQTT (Mosquitto) broker on the Raspberry Pi server.
Gestures
This week, I also worked on refining the exact gestures we would recognize. I worked to help break down our conceptual actions (zoom, pan, and rotation) into concrete gestures that we could recognize. We managed to break this down into 5 specific gestures:
- Enable transmission
- Disable transmission
- Zoom in
- Zoom out
- Rotate
- Pan
The gestures are explained in more detail here: Gestures
Schedule
Currently, we are still on schedule to finish the project in a timely manner.
Upcoming Deliverables
This coming week, I will be working on formalizing these design decisions in the design report. Specifically, I will work on finding resources to back up our design choices and, if necessary, modify them if resources state otherwise.
Relevant ECE Courses
- 18-100, 18-220, 18-240, 18-794,