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Joseph’s Status Report for 4/8

This week I modified the Unity line rendering scripts to accept input from the hardware pen fed through Uduino that my partners worked on. I modified the script so that by touching the screen, a new anchor point would be created at that location in the world, and is where any new drawings would be placed until you touch the screen at a different location. I have also started working on the cloud anchoring, which would allow multiple devices to see the drawings created by one user/device.

Testing-wise, through use of the application, one can verify that the line algorithm works properly, as the lines drawn are very accurate and smooth where you draw them with your finger. When the hardware pen is fully able to function with the software, our testing would be comparing the lines drawn by the hardware pen with the lines drawn with the finger, making sure they aren’t jaggy and instead are smooth. I’d say that we are on schedule as we have done the main work in integrating the hardware and software and are simply working through the kinks of getting it all running smoothly right now.

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Sophia’s Status Report 4/8

This week, I focused on hardware and software communication for the purpose of our interim demo. We were able to get the hardware communication with the software working serially through a USB cable on desktop Unity with Uduino. We additionally were able to test it and get Wi-Fi communication working as well. However, the moment we tried to port it to Android phone, the app was unable to detect the hardware pen prototype. As such, we have began discussing alternatives such as trying Bluetooth communication instead and writing our own network socket. We have additionally looked into other packages we could potentially use, but writing our own likely will be the best idea. Our schedule has been updated so we are currently on track. If we keep up the pace and dedicate some more time outside of class and potentially on the weekends, we are hopefully on track to reach MVP and have something cool to show for our final demo. 

Next week, we will spend some more time trying to troubleshoot the Wifi communication once it has been ported to Android phone. If that doesn’t work too well, I will assist Anthony to hopefully get Bluetooth communication working well. Additionally, I will be working on the calibration of our pen to hopefully get better data points that can be sent to the Unity App as well. We have not done any specific testing yet, but as soon as integration has been complete, we will start running the line tests that we have described in our design review. 

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Joseph’s Status Report for 4/1

This week I was finally able to complete the line rendering algorithm. In other words, I  have successfully ported to the phone, a Unity app that draws a 3d line in space whenever you hold a finger down on the screen and move the phone around. Right now the way we decide the points in space where the lines are drawn between is gotten from the touch input on the screen. Eventually, we plan to replace this touch input with the data gotten from the hardware pen. This is something that we hope to be able to do this following week using Uduino, even if the data isn’t 100% accurate. Otherwise, we are on schedule, as integration of hardware and software was planned for a little later. While my teammates figure out the Uduino, I plan to start integrating cloud anchoring into the software so the line drawings are stored in the cloud and able to be viewed by multiple devices.

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Sophia’s Status Report 4/1

The beginning of this week was spent trying to figure out the how to determine distances from the raw IMU data. Instead of using the orientation vector, which was causing issues as discussed in my previous status report, I have decided to use the gryo parameter instead.  I have found a couple tutorials on how to incorporate a gyro parameter in order to potentially get better rotational orientation. As of now, from the acceleration data, I “double integrate”  by multiplying the acceleration vector by the time stamp. From this, I generate positional (x, y, z) coordinates. I spent the rest of the week working with Anthony on our hardware and software communication with Uduino. I wrote a very simple test script that tries to send “Hello” to Unity, but there were a lot of struggles trying to get Unity to work in the first place. The testing for this communication will need to be carried over into next week. Below is our code repo that we will be updating with our scripts.

https://github.com/murrowow/18500-capstone-hardware

As of now, we are technically ahead of schedule since integration between hardware and software is a little later. However, the hardware itself is still not fully able to provide extremely accurate distance coordinates. This updating and tweaking of the hardware is meant to occur this week and up to the next week.

Next week will be spent flushing out Uduino for our hardware software communication and figuring our gyroscope in order to get more accurate positional coordinates.

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Team’s Status Report 4/1

Currently there are no specific risks that might jeopardize our besides what has already been mentioned.

Currently no changes have been made to our design and it is planned to continue with what we have currently planned.

No serious changes have occurred to our schedule besides a slight focus on integration now, rather than later, for our demo presentation. In general though we are on track and the current schedule still applies.

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Anthony’s Status Report 4/1

This week our group has mainly been focused on making sure we are prepared for our demo presentation. I specifically have been working on the app as mentioned in the previous status report. There was a slight pivot that was mentioned prior though, because I have specifically been working on hopefully integrating out hardware with our application in some fashion. This has been done by trying to figure out how to use the Uduino package in Unity, which will help with sending data over from our pen device to our unity app. I was able to get it to work, and have been able to confirm that the two can communicate with each other.

Currently we are not necessarily behind, rather on track to make progress. This has readjusted our schedule slightly since we had originally planned on intricate integration taking place last, but for the demo and for practical reasons it make sense to get the MVP working.

This next week I hope to get it integrated where our pen device can communicate with the app, and also continue working on the app itself, so it is intuitive for our users to play the game.

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Anthony’s Report 3/25

I have been able to get access to the phone devices so that I could start testing and using the actual Unity interface for testing. After taking some times trying to figure out how to get the phones to work, with unity, I was able to start trying to figure out how to code our game in unity. Most of this week was getting accustomed to the new interface, and also some small implementations as well.

In terms of progress, we are still a little bit more behind than we would have liked to be currently in the project, but not so much so that it is an issue for us at the moment. Extra time will need to be taken to try to catch up, and make sure we do not get more behind than we currently are.

This next week I hope to get a majority of the base of the game created, so that once it is time for our demo, we will have something to show.

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Joseph’s Status Report for 3/25

I am still in the process of coding the line rendering algorithm, so that is what I’ve been working on for the week. Besides that, I helped Anthony set-up the Android phones that were received and push the project build to the phone successfully. I also made a team Unity account so we can share paid Unity packages that are downloaded. I’ve tested that this works, having downloaded and imported the Uduino packages into the project and pushed them to Github.

This week was pretty busy for me due to all the preparation for Greek Sing happening today, so I didn’t manage to get as much done code-wise as I hoped. This means I am behind schedule, but I am still hopeful in getting a mostly functional algorithm by the Interim deadline.

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Team’s Status Report 03/25

We were finally able to purchase the Uduino software package with help from ECE purchasing. We also finally were able to obtain our additional Android phones, one borrowed and one purchased, for the purposes of testing.

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Sophia’s Status Report 03/25

This week was dedicated to our ethics discussions. It was a useful experience as it definitely helped open my eyes and see some ethical considerations we hadn’t thought of before. In terms of more technical work, I spent some time coding up our IMU script. I have settled on using the wrapper functions rather than tinkering with the raw data as the raw data is formatted in a way that parsing through it manually myself will introduce a bunch of unnecessary overhead and make it difficult to hit our proposed latency goals. I have been struggling a little bit to get the rotation vector working properly since all provided angles are positive. It has then been difficult to differentiate a tilt from the left versus a tilt from the right. Its unclear if this will cause future issues for us when it comes to calculating line position so I want to debug this as thoroughly as possible before reaching that point. I have also finally been able to purchase Uduino after help from the ECE purchasing. I have not yet tested how well Uduino works with our NodeMCU board.

I am still slightly behind schedule because by now I should have the double integration script working. However, the next few weeks have been allotted for debugging and fine-turning, which is technically what I am working on right now. I will be working on this a little bit over the weekend to hopefully figure out this little bump and be right on schedule.

Next week will be spent fine tuning our IMU script and trying to test its integration with Uduino to send data over to our Android devices.