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Samay’s Status Report for Feb 17th, 2024

This week, I spent a significant amount of time on refining our implementation plan as we approach our design review this upcoming week. In particular, our team had many concerns about both the size and power issues of our initial plan to use an array of actuators that each control each braille pin. In terms of size, there were no affordable actuators that were realistically small enough for our requirements. We also considered the power usage of the available solenoids, which require a current always to keep a pin up.

As a result, my progress was also behind for this week since we got caught in these technical issues. However, I made significant progress during a meeting on Friday with our group. I suggested we find inspiration on the internet for other methods of actuating an array of pins. This led to great team progress with a newer idea (sliders for every column that have an encoding that cycles through all combinations of pins per column).

I also contributed to the design review presentation and document by addressing the implementation plan and researching which components exactly we need. I started by looking into the types of small motors we could use to precisely control the sliders. For example, I compared stepper motors to servo motors in terms of precision, speed, power, and size. I found that there were similar size characteristics but stepper motors require less power.

Next week, I hope to first finalize an initial parts list based on our current implementation plan. I aim to also order parts to begin testing as well as begin on CAD models for the device.

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Samay’s Status Report for 02/10/24

• What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week I worked on the project proposal, primarily contributing to refining our use case and use case requirements from last week’s abstract and planning the team’s preliminary schedule. This was as part of developing our project proposal for the presentation this week. Specifically, I researched the quantifiable requirements to satisfy users’ reading speed, functionality, and accuracy goals. I established for the group that we need to choose our actuators and design the system to satisfy at least the average reading speed of 240 wpm, given the use case of being a braille e-reader device.

Secondly, I was in charge of planning out our schedule for the semester. I first broke down our list of tasks into smaller 1-week tasks to build the Gantt chart. I then divided these tasks among each of us according to our division of labour plan; I was then able to schedule tasks over the next few weeks either sequentially or in parallel, according to interdependencies between tasks. The final component was a testing schedule that I assured was not all scheduled at the end. Instead, I placed deadlines for intermittently testing our different subsystems over the next weeks.

• Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

My progress is on schedule so far.

• What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I hope to finalize the specific design of the actuator array and audio feedback systems in preparation for the design review presentation next week.

Since I presented the proposal, I will also review the feedback I received regarding both content and presentation skills. I will meet with my team mainly to discuss the feedback we received about really specifying our solution approach and concerns about some of our testing criteria.