Yujun’s Status Report for Apr 20, 2024
• What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or
photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient
I finished the web-app for the project where the user is able to input their words directly into the braille pad. We decided to input words this way to reduce the tediousness of creating a txt file and then inputting the txt file into the webapp. With the web-app now directly taking input from the user by typing the words in, the user is now able to see all the words that are transported into the braille pad and delete them as necessary.
• Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be
The progress is slighted behind with the motor and braille integration still incomplete. We are to finish this task by tomorrow before the final presentation. As we have faced many mechanical issues with the braille pad we will be continuously testing our actuation method with the plethora of gears and motors we obtained a few days ago.
• What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
By next week, we hope to finish our final presentation, as well as the report (software part for me). Futhermore, I wish to do a final test on the serial communication between the webapp and the arduino board to ensure that we meet the user case requirement.
- As you’ve designed, implemented and debugged your project, what new tools or new knowledge did you find it necessary to learn to be able to accomplish these tasks? What learning strategies did you use to acquire this new knowledge?
To implement the web app I had to learn how to create a website in javascript and html from scratch. To do so, I had to learn the html and javascript language as well as the library that allows a javascript to run a python file. To acquire these skills I have delved into youtube tutorials on creating various websites to understand how HTML code works to format a website. In addition, I explored libraries posted on shecodes.io where extensive documentation on library functions could be found with examples. Lastly, I found asking for verbal guidance from friends in the industry very helpful where they gave advice on which language or framework to use for creating a website(ex: typescript vs javascript vs Flask on python).
Ziyu Li’s Status Report for April 6th, 2024
What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
Two major things is done this week: 1. using hand to hold the motor to actuate the slider from last week, I identified that the best place to mount the motor is actually above the slider, not underneath like I expected. This is likely due to when motor is underneath, it also provides an upward force to the slider, causing it to jam with the pins more easily. Mounting the motor on the top can eliminate this non-horizontal force since the support for the slider is underneath. 2. Given this, I redesigned the whole actuator by allocating more space between the cover and the slider, I also designed and tested the motor mount, which at the moment does not work perfectly since their are some tolerance differences from the 3D printer, but I am confident that I can solve this tomorrow.
Is your progress on schedule or behind?
If compared to the original plan, which is to build 10x of these actuators and having with coordinate with each other, I am definitely behind. However, since the interim demo, we acknowledged that having one braille cell work perfectly is more important than building a ~70% working whole, and given the difficulties in this process is much bigger than we expected, we have scale down to that. And in this regard we are on schedule.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
A single braille cell working, shifting to different braille patterns.
Test that I am planning to run
After I get the braille cell working next week, I’ll focus on three major tests to make sure our product is meeting the original design requirement:
- activation speed: the slider should be able to move from one end to the other under 200ms.
- Jam frequency: the slider should not be jam in between at least 15 actuations (switching from one position to the next under the speed outlined in 1)
- Jam recovery: the actuator should automatically detect jam situation and recover from it using the back-and-forth motion in under 500ms.
Yujun’s Status Report for April 6th, 2024
What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
I researched on various web application making tools and decided to stick with flask for its usability and compatibility with python which is the language the translation algorithm is made on. So far, I’ve created a simple web page with a text box which can take inputs from the user and store the input data within the web page domain. Next week, I plan to create a fully function web page that is able to generate a prompt for the user to type in the input or upload a txt file, and is able to generate a braille encoding file from the input.
In particular, how will you analyze the anticipated measured results to verify your contribution to the project meets the engineering design requirements or the use case requirements?
The anticipated results for testing of the web application and braille translation algorithm is as following:
– Translation Reliability : close to 100%
– Data transfer reliability: 95%
Right now, I have already tested the translation algorithm on 5 iteration of testing, each on varying types (braille-contractable, non-braille-contractible, prefixed words, short words, long words.) For each type 20 random words were chosen from a word generator online. On every iteration of testing, the translation algorithm yielded a 100% accuracy which was verified through pre-existing verified braille translation websites. The comparison was possible through a temporary display function made for testing which translated the encoding to the computer terminal. Thus, it can be said that the accuracy of the translation met the translation reliability use case requirement, and we do not have to consider the ethical concerns for the project that pertains to translation inaccuracy and unreliabilty.
In the future, I will be testing the reliability of the data transfer between the web application and the braille pad. To be reliable we decided that if we input 100 words, at least 95 words should be able to be transferred successfully to the pad as based on a normal person’s learning curve, around 70 words and braille patterns can be fully memorized within a full school day at most. Thus, our 95% is sufficient for reliability. To test this we will iterate the transfer of 100 word inputs to the braille pad 10 times via wifi transfer to find the average. If the wifi transfer fails the test, then we will resort to serial bus transfer (higher accuracy) as a back up plan.
Yujun’s Status Report for March 30th, 2024
• What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
This week, I helped Samay in implementing my braille translation code to the motor code to enable a successful integration between software and the hardware. To effectively map out the motors to the translation output encoding, I designed my code to output a txt file in binary format which could be easily read by Samay’s Arduino code and explained what each bit signifies within the encoding:
4 bits per motor:
1st bit: bottom motor
2nd bit: middle motor
3rd bit: top motor
4th bit: end of word marker
• Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
In terms of the software part, the project is on schedule, yet there is a potential for the hardware to miss the demo deadline due to the fact that the 3D printing output requires extreme precision to carry out the motions required by the sliders and actuator pins. To prevent any delays, I plan to communicate with Ziyu to provide assistance towards testing the casing for the braille actuators.
• What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Next week we are planning to purchase a mini speaker to attach to our microcontroller and I’m planning to implement the code for the speaker so that it can successfully read out the braille translation outputs to the user. Furthermore, I am planning to research on wifi file transmission libraries for the microcontroller since our microcontroller is compatible with wifi.
Yujun Lee’s Status Report for March 9th, 2024
What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
- After finishing the planning and structuring for the braille translation algorithm, I finished a initial version of the diagram representing the user-flow of the web-app.
- Design report writing.
Is your progress on schedule or behind?
Our schedule ended up being behind due to a teammate’s incompletion of the report, yet the set back is trivial and we have finished the final version of the design report. To make sure none no more set backs are in the future, we plan to communicate more effectively over slack and make sure to have a meeting an hour or two before any deliverable due date to ensure that we are all on page and everyone is on track with the work division requirement for the specific deliverable.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Even though it is not a specific deliverable, I plan to familiarize myself with web development through reading through flask libraries and web-app implementation tutorials. Moreover, I plan deliver a test plan for the braille translation algorithm, including the test cases, and the tester python file to ensure its robustness before integrating with the hardware.