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Team’s Status Report 2/25

Most of this week was dedicated to flushing out issues brought up in our design presentation as well as working on the design report. There were a few holes in the hardware that needed to be addressed, specifically regarding how the pen would be calibrated. We have narrowed it down to two potential methods: requiring a calibration stage that places the pen on the ground or requiring another static device that doesn’t move to serve as a reference point. We want to discuss more during our meeting to see which one may be better.

We have adjusted team assignments so that Anthony will be assisting Sophia with hardware more so in the beginning. There are a lot of areas that need to be flushed out more fully so having two people will hopefully make the design more robust and created more quickly, which is a necessity due to the software depending on the hardware.

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Sophia’s Status Report 2/25

This week was spent working on the design presentation. There were a few gaps that needed to be addressed afterwards, which included how we were planning on calibrating our device and the feasibility of our hardware and software communication plans.

We discussed and narrowed down our approach to potential two methods. One would be to place the “hardware pen” onto the ground as a reference point in the beginning to serve as the start. This, however, may potentially cause calibration issues due to increased drift and may require the inconvenience of constantly having to place it on the ground to refresh the starting point.

The other one would be to place another device on a static spot as a reference point for the pen’s movement in the air. This may reduce the issue of drift, but will also require the inconvenience of having more equipment which would increase the cost of our project and make it less user-friendly. We will likely need to discuss with our advisors to see which one would be a better approach in the long run.

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Sophia’s Status Report for 02/18

I wrote a simple IMU and Wi-Fi connection script to test the hardware when it arrives. I was able to test it on an older Arduino model I have at home and it seemed to be able to work fine, so the script should be able to work well on the ordered devices. Additionally, I designed a communication protocol for how our hardware will send data over to Unity and other devices.

Much of this week was dedicated to making our slides and flushing out our design presentation for next week.

Applicable courses I have taken are 18-220 and other hardware design courses such as 18-341 and 18-447. Additionally, I have participated in Build18 for several semesters where I have used many of the devices and microprocessors I will be using for this project. Additionally, taking math classes classes like 15-462 (graphics) and 18-660 (optimization) will aid me greatly in calculating lines from the IMU raw data.

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Team Status Report for 2/18

We spent most of our week flushing out our design. Aside from this, we did a small amount of work to begin our project. For hardware, we spent some time writing some testing scripts. For software, we were able to port out a simple AR app to an Android phone and run it successfully.

One principle that our team used to develop our design solution was communication between hardware and software. This was inspired by a hardware handshake protocol similar to a USB’s NAK-ACK.

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Team Status Report for 2/11

This week we worked on our project proposal and presented it.  Our project of AR Pictionary includes considerations for entertainment and social bonding. This project attempts to take a game that a lot of people recognize and make it more active, interactive, and fun to encourage social bonding and playing games in a more active way.

This week, we worked on researching both the hardware and software aspects of our project. In terms of hardware, we have narrowed down which devices want and will want to test. For software, we have set up the Unity environment and have started researching the AR packages that we will want to use like ARCore.

 

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Sophia’s Status Report for 02/11/2023

The first half of the week was dedicated more towards getting our Proposal Presentation polished — which I also presented. Afterwards, I spent time researching IMUs, Arduino attachments, and other hardware devices we could use to develop our pen.  I have settled on using an Arduino plus an ESP8266 due to its low cost, plentiful documentation, ability for communication over Wi-Fi, and my prior experience with these devices. Additionally, I have narrowed down the selection to 3 IMUs. All seem to meet the specs of this project, so I will purchase a few of each so I can test them and see which ones are better suited for our purposes.

While I wait for the IMUs to arrive, I have started testing communication between an Arduino and Unity through Wi-Fi.