Risks & Challenges
Our efforts are directed towards sketching out the hardware, involving laser cutting acrylic for mounts. This is a potential risk because the mounting hardware may not actually act as intended, in which case we would need to come up with a new hardware approach with different materials, like 3D designing a mount and then gorilla gluing it to mount. Luckily, the hardware components are not extensive because we only need to mount a small camera and two lights. Nathalie’s research led to consideration of SCNPath for indicating the covered area. However, this has challenges in modifying attributes like color retroactively based on real-time data and keeping lines in memory as it is with SCNLine. She has been working on path coloration logic, but this is dependent on the process of integrating it with Bluetooth message reception. Issues with the Bluetooth include its reliability and speed. Erin has been working on attempting to speedup the BLE data transmission. Unfortunately, it may be bottlenecked, and we are unsure if we are able to get any additional speedup beyond what our current system offers. Our biggest challenge is time with the final demo looming, so effective prioritization of tasks is super important.
Schedule
Thankfully, we are back on track this week after figuring out all the issues with the BLE transmission. We have mounted the AR detection image, as well as the Jetson camera. The Jetson computing source has yet to be fully attached to the system, as we are keeping it independent in the case that we need to continue development. The phone mount has also been attached to the vacuum system. We are currently working on final stages of testing and verification, as well as the final presentation, demo, and poster.
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?
Tools used: laser cutting, material management, setting objectives for each meeting
Learning strategies: constant communication, goal setting for each meeting so that we knew what needed to be accomplished in the work sessions, selecting a Plan B/C alternative in case our original plan doesn’t work
We’ve encountered various challenges that required us to learn new tools and knowledge to overcome them. Most of our ECE experience has been with software, so we had to learn and coordinate designing mounts using laser cutting materials of acrylic and wood. Something else we learnt was how to handle Apple documentation about ARKit and how to handle the official documentation/implementations alongside the developer community’s add-on solutions ARKit. SCNPath and SCNLine are created by a freelance developer before (maxfrazer) before he began working for Apple.
To acquire these new skills and technical knowledge, we relied on constant communication and goal setting for our meetings. We made sure to discuss our progress and challenges regularly, setting clear objectives for each meeting to ensure that we were aligned on what needed to be accomplished. That way, we could prioritize which tasks were related to our system integration, and then allow feature improvements to occur asynchronously on our own time.