Final Video Demo
Link: https://youtu.be/TN-St_racKw
Final Report
Final Poster
This is our final poster.
Yuxuan’s Status Report for 04/29/2023
This week I mainly worked with Xiao to do the testing. My main focus is on latency. Previously the testing method is inserting time.time() before sending and after receiving the request and find the time difference divided by 2. However, this method seems to have some flaws since it isn’t necessary that send and receive times are equal. Therefore, we again used the slow motion camera to measure the time the button is pressed and the time input changes on the screen. The result hovers around 116-125ms which is around 6 times worse than our design requirement of 20ms. A few improvements we later discussed can be reducing the response message length to minimum and removing all the prints on the screen. We also make sure that the latency should be tested at different distances.
Next week, we will refine our testing and start working on the poster and final report. I will also try to invite 3 users to test our product.
Xiao’s Weekly Status Update (04/29)
My task this week is the testing of all the metrics of our design. Since I am responsible for the integration, and I have the device, I am mostly responsible for actually doing the testing and gathering the data, while my team mates are responsible for designing the tests. We have met our design goals in some areas, such as gyro drift limit and battery life. However, some metrics such as weight and gyro oscillation are not as fine-tuned as we would like.
Videos and pictures of testing results are in the Team’s Status Report.
We are on track. Test data is ready to be incorporated into the final report.
Team Status Report for 04/29/2023
The team focus on performing tests this week. Generally speaking, the results we get are not satisfying, as we find some outputs are different from what we expect. We are keep trying to migitate those problem, and this could be a risk for us to finish the project. However, the user experience looks good as we keep using the mobile steering wheel to play the game.
Weight test:
Our project has a weight of 666g and our design goal is 400g. It seems we underestimate the weight of our components, and probably made a mistake when define the use case requirement: the joysticks we refer to do not have a big screen and a battery as large as ours, so we may want to change our use case requirement.
Battery life test:
Our project has a battery life for approximatly 4.5 hours, and our initial design aims to have 8 hours of battery life. The test results is generated from our measurement for the power consumption of our project for an average of 4W, and we have a rechargable 18.5Wh battery. The screen drains a lot of energy and we cannot add larger battery due to our trade-off between weight and battery life. I think we need to change our use case requirement for this, since 4.5 hours should be enough for normal players.
Latency test:
We plan to have around 30ms latency for the bluetooth connection. We use a slow motion to record the frames passed between the time we press a button and the time the computer receives it. In our camera has 240fps, our project takes around 28 frames to make response, which gives us a latency around 116-125ms. This differs a lot from our expection, and we are thinking if we should change our design requirement, as the experience of latency is not that large when playing with it.
Gyroscope drift test:
The target for the gyroscope tests are checking its stability and accuracy. The stability test requires the gyroscope to keep its drifting with in 1 degree. The result shows that the gyroscope output has some noises, but its avearge’s change is with in the 1 degree limit, as the data shown below gives us an average change within 0.8 degrees for 8 consecutive readings, and it’s not drifting away.
Qiaoan’s Status Report for 04/29/2023
This week I have two tasks:
The first and primary task is performing tests for the gyroscope part. Please check the team status report for the video about gyroscope tests. The target for the gyroscope tests are checking its stability and accuracy. The stability test requires the gyroscope to keep its drifting with in 1 degrees. The result shows that the gyroscope output has some noises, but the avearge is not drifting. To better generating this output, I want to apply a Gaussian filter (the one for image processing), which produces a result based on a weighted average of recent gyro readings, to the gyroscope results instead of separating the results to steps of 5 degrees as we implemented now to migitate this issue. The accuracy test measures the tilt error of the gyroscope. We expect the error to be smaller than 0.5 degree, due to the noise the raw data should not fit for this requirement. We are trying to generate average degree data that matches the physical degrees as we keep working on modifying the Gaussian filter to generate a more accurate average degree output.
The second task is preparing the poster for the project. I added some images to the poster and subtitute some texts.
Generally speaking, I think I’m a little behind the schedule due to new challenges we find from testing. However, one thing I noticed is that from the user experience perspective, the current version of our project runs well when I was playing with it. Next week I will focus on testing and finishing final poster and report, as well as preparing for the demo session.
Final Presentation
Team Status Report for 04/22/2023
This week we’ve been integrating hardware, gyro algorithm, and software pieces together into a runnable game controller. Xiao has 3D printed a steering wheel case that encloses all the hardware components and wirings of the controller. Qiaoan has been working on the gyro tuning and refining the algorithm. There were some subtle bugs in our implementation of the Magwick algorithm which Qiaoan fixed this week. Yuxuan has been working on the lagging game data issue and was able to fix it by writing the data first into a file and reading them separately.
So far, we have a running mobile steering controller that controls the car via Bluetooth when buttons are pressed and when the steering wheels are rotated. The short demo video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0n3i1ka-VY.
Since we are still working on our final presentation so we haven’t done any quantitative tests yet, but the details of the test procedure will be included in the presentation. Next week’s focus will be following the test procedure and gathering quantitative test results. We also need to start working on the final report early to ensure its quality.