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Team Status Report for 02/10

Risk and Plans

1. Compatibility and Availability of parts:

This is a major risk for the project at this time because the parts are the foundation of the project. The risk lies in the discrepancies between the advertisement online and the actual product. If the product comes in as not what we are expecting, this could cause delays to our schedule and alter our plans.

We are mitigating these risks by asking people who are familiar with the parts that we are looking for, hoping for a more accurate review. We also plan to order more quantity than needed for each component in case there are manufacturing issues. In addition to the parts that we want, we also have several backup plans that we can order quickly.

2. Integration:

We need to make sure that each part that we plan will integrate properly with others. It might look good on paper, but the actual integration of HW and SW is challenging. We risk taking longer than expected time to solve those issues. These risks are managed by having slack time to troubleshoot the issue.

Changes in Design 

  1. No more 9V battery pack, use normal power bank instead since most of our components use 5V
    • Benefits:
      • Eliminates need for DC voltage converter
      • Easier to find off the shelf parts, or people can just use their own power bank
    • Drawbacks:
      • Need to design our own tail light to fit 5V power source
  2. Settled on RPi 4 for main embedded system
    • We felt that the performance uplift of the RPi 5 (2 – 3x) was unnecessary for our project when the RPi 4 might provide enough performance at a lower power draw (both idle, under load, and peak power usage)

Schedule Updates

There as been an adjustment to the start date from 02/02 to 02/12 for the turn signal schematic design to give Johnny more time to work on it. This pushes back the start of the CAD design for the enclosures which in turn pushes back the integration date and reduces our slack time to .

We are exploring whether we can do the enclosure design in parallel with the turn signal design so we can move the integration date back up again.

Here is the updated schedule:

Gantt chart, click to open full size

Documents

https://course.ece.cmu.edu/~ece500/projects/s24-teama3/wp-content/uploads/sites/270/2024/02/Team_A3_Tian_Wang_Lu_proposal.pdf

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qXdcfVPIODVeR-x2SSulSoF8A1yPflvq7Hq1ibca5z0/edit

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Jack Wang’s Status Report for 2/10/24

Personal Accomplishments:

  1. Presentation (4 hrs): Together with my teammates, I prepared and presented the proposal presentation on Monday.  Please see here for more details on our presentation.
  2. Lab Meetings (4 hrs): I listened to other teams’ proposal presentations during lab sessions, asking questions and providing feedback. I was able to hear about other people’s projects while reflecting on our project to see what can we improve.
  3. Project Meetings (4 hrs): I met with my teammates outside the mandatory lab meetings and discussed the bill of materials (BOM) for our project. I spent time researching possible radar modules that we can use to do blind spot detections. As of the time of the post, I have narrowed down the choices to two radars (K-LD7 & HB100). I will continue to discuss with my teammates to make a final decision.

Progress:

My progress is on schedule so far.

Next Week:

  1. Review and finalize parts on our BOM.
  2. Review the documentation for the radar that we choose and search for compatible libraries if needed.
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Jason Lu’s Status Report for 02/10

This week, I focused on the following tasks:

  • Working on and finishing up the proposal presentation slides
  • Working on and completing the Gantt chart for our team which is displayed below:
    • I originally developed the Gantt chart using a software called Project Libre which was listed in the lecture slides, but it was extremely laggy with scrolling on my computer so I switched to another software called GanttProject
    • Thank God Project Libre was able to export in Microsoft Project format and that GanttProject can import it, so I didn’t lose too much time!
    • There was some weird issues with the length of tasks that required manual editing, and I also ran into a bug with GanttProject where assigning people using the right click menu caused duplicate events to show up in the resource allocation page (that displays how many tasks each person has assigned). I had to use the properties page for each task as a work around.

  • Attending the mandatory lab meetings and participating in the peer review process
  • Researching the difference between an RPi 5 and 4 which ended up boiling down to higher performance for the RPi 5 compared to the 4 in exchange for higher power draw based on https://hackaday.com/2023/09/28/a-raspberry-pi-5-is-better-than-two-pi-4s/ and https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Raspberry-Pi-5-Benchmarks
  • Researching viable radars for us to use
    • I discovered that the K-LD7 radar can detect vehicles up to 30 m away and reports targets over serial which is nice because we don’t need to do any signal processing unlike the similar K-LC7 which only gives us I/Q data which apparently we need to manually signal process because it only gives us the sinusoidal data
    • However, I later discovered that the K-LD7 radar cannot detect stationary target detection which might pose a problem if a car is traveling at the exact same speed as the bicycle
    • Because of that, I spent a lot of time researching what other radar tranceivers exist. Some interesting ones I found were:
      • DISTANCE2GOL from Infineon along with other evaluation boards from Infineon because I didn’t want to design our own PCB especially with RF
      • TI evaluation boards for their automotive radars – If we could use the automotive radars that would be great because they are used in real cars which are battle tested, but the evaluation boards are insanely expensive like this one
      • Radars from SEEEDStudio like this 60 GHz module, but from reading the description it looked like they were more for human detection than vehicles
      • Acconeer radars – These radars had great specs but the evaluation boards were pretty expensive
    • Professor Tamal suggested looking at a previous team that used microwave radars for their bicycle safety system (Team B3 in F21), and they used the SEN0306 which looked promising. However, I was a little hesitant about the range since in team B3’s final report they state that it only worked up to 11 m which technically meets our requirements but is shorter than the 30 m for the K-LD7
    • I eventually realized that the K-LD7 product page literally lists blind spot monitoring as a use of it, so I was much more comfortable with it

My personal progress is on track according to the schedule, my only task this week was to choose the central computer and we did.

My deliverables for the following week are:

  1. Get the RPi up and running
  2. Select a graphical framework
  3. Write a barebones hello world GUI application
  4. Select and order a display to attach to the RPi
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Johnny Tian’s Status Report for Feb. 10th

Accomplishment of this week

  1. Mandatory Lab (4h)
  2. Presentation Technical Challenge, System Choice, Solution Approach (4h)
  3. Research Switch, LED, Battery  (4h)

Schedule Update

  1. Unable to start schematics due to lack of parts order. Need to postpone the circuit design due to parts not available.

Next Week Plan

  1. Start Box Exterior Design (50%)
  2. Start schematics design for switch tail light (50%)

Documents

https://course.ece.cmu.edu/~ece500/projects/s24-teama3/wp-content/uploads/sites/270/2024/02/Team_A3_Tian_Wang_Lu_proposal.pdf

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qXdcfVPIODVeR-x2SSulSoF8A1yPflvq7Hq1ibca5z0/edit?usp=sharing

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Introduction and Project Summary

Introducing Bike Buddy, your safety partner while cycling on the road.

Bike commuters need a better safety system to protect them when sharing the road with larger vehicles. We propose implementing a bicycle safety suite based on cars with blind spot detection, rear and forward collision alerts, and turn signaling with automatic cancellation to improve bike commuter safety through increased cyclists’ awareness of their surroundings and vehicle awareness of cyclists’ intentions. Additionally, we will show safety and navigation information on a mounted display. We hope to make this product more accurate than previous creations and easier to use.