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Yujun Lee’s Status Report for Feb 10, 2024

This week I was able to talk to the CMU librarian about existing support for the visually impaired. Coupled with additional research done on the braille language, I was able to become familiar with the general structure and the standards for braille and also realized that our product is indeed needed for the blind population.

The progress of myself as well as the team is on track and to make sure we are on schedule in the future we are going to meet at least once outside of the class time provided to us every week. We also have been communicating regularly over slack and messages to ensure we are on track.

By next week I plan to have the braille database ready to use for the software, and find ways to encode the braille patterns into a matrix or find a more data-efficient way of storing the patterns to reduce memory usage.

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Ziyu Li’s Status Report for Feb 10th

This week I put most of my effort into learning PCB design online. Since our project require us to layout linear actuators in a compact way, this would definitely be needed further down the road. No one on the team have any practical experience with this field, so I had to learn from scratch, which was a fun experience. Although our proof of concept will likely not involve any PCB, I would still like to place my one first order within next week, so that we can be sure this won’t be a challenge in the future.

Another thing I worked on is I researched the different mini electromagnetic actuator components that are readily available on the market right now, and locked on a 6mm one that seems to be promising. The idea is we would like to place the order for this component in small amount next week, and test its capabilities. Ideally we can fit some kind of already-existing solutions into our system.

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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.