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William’s Status Report 4/12/2025

Accomplishments This Week

  • 3D printed the housing for the ARDUCAM
  • Soldered and tested the GPS module, however, it didn’t work as well as expected. Thus, we will be reverting back to the Blues Notecard. I was able to integrate the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller onto the Blues Notecard.
  • Manual Trigger with testing button.

Reflection on Schedule

  • Slightly behind schedule. However, with completely focusing on the integration aspect of the flow, I still believe that we will be able to get everything done well before the demo deadline.

Plans For Next Week:

  • Fully integrate entire pipeline with manual trigger
  • Housing for the “pocket” module, will require more 3D printing and measuring
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William’s Status Report for 3/29/2025

Accomplishments This Week:

This week, I continued working on the micro-controller development of the hardware parts. We ran into a few issues with the automation aspect of capturing image to the server receiving the image serially through the Python library PySerial. Thus, we switched into MQTT transmission between the PICO captured image and the local server running on our laptop. The pipeline between the captured image and our local server host now works.

In regards to the location module of the system with the Blues Notecard, it is able to communicate the coordinates between the module and the local server via HTTP. However, the automation has a little bit of issues since it can only communicate twice then the device shuts down for some reason.  In addition, the location seem a little bit far from our expectations. Thus, I requested to replace the module with GPS tracker here.

According to some research, it seems a lot more accurate than the Blues Notecard and can provide real-time configuration of the location. This should be fairly easy to configure via UART, so we plan on trying to switch this component for the location aspect of the project. It should be a pretty easy transition here.

Reflection on Schedule:

I think that considering four weeks left till the final demo, our group is still on track to finish by the final demo. The location module seems intuitive to complete, so we will focus on integration and design for the remaining weeks.

Plans for Next Week:

We will be spending some time on the interim demo. In addition, we will also order another GPS device for our location and integration + location will be our main focus for the week.

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William’s Status Report for 3/22/2025

Accomplishments This Week:

This week, I continued focusing on the microcontroller development. I shifted focus working on configuring the Arducam with GPIO pins into the Raspberry Pi PICO as well as flashing the microcontroller. After Dhruv finished up his work on the signalling between RPI Pico and laptop, he and I worked through the documentation of Arducam and was able to finally successfully capture an image. This is good progress on the hardware side as now the Arducam works on top of the  RPI being able to connect to the wifi successfully.

Reflection on Schedule:

I am currently on schedule now that the Arducam is working. With shifted focus onto the Blues Notecard next week, I am confident in the completion of the schedule.

Plans for Next Week:

I will continue setting up the Blues Notecard for GPS handling of the device as well as refining the picture quality and distance of the captured image on the Arducam. Currently the image seems a little bit zoomed in, so I will work on trying to allow the image to zoom out a bit. Hopefully, the Blues Notecard is completed by the end of next week without any complications.

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William’s Status Report for 3/15/2025

This week, I continued working on the script/microcontroller code with the Raspberry Pi Pico W. Last week, there were still some reliability issues with maintaining the connection. However, after adding some additional configuration code to the microcontroller, it appears that the connection is now stable, which is the main improvement from last week.

After fixing the wifi connection with the RPI Pico, I am still in progress with the configuration process of the Blues Notecard as it is also having some connecting issues with our hotspot, but I am close to getting the configuration of Blues Notecard completed.

I am still slightly behind schedule. However,  the Blues Notecard is close to being done, and I will almost next focus on the Arducam. Since Dhruv is close to being done on the software end, he will jump in to help me with the Arducam next week as well to speed up the technical development progress.

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William’s Status Report for 3/8/2025

This week, I made progress on embedded development with the Raspberry Pi Pico W. I successfully flashed the microcontroller and established a basic connection to Wi-Fi. While there are still some reliability issues with maintaining the connection, I plan to debug and refine this in the coming week.

Additionally, I started experimenting with the Blues Notecard, going through the setup process and initial configuration. I encountered some challenges in getting it to properly send data, but I will continue troubleshooting and refining the integration.

Overall, while I am making progress, I am still slightly behind schedule in getting the different components to communicate effectively. My goal for next week is to establish a stable connection between the Pico W and the Blues Notecard, allowing for basic data transmission. If time permits, I will also begin working on integrating the Arducam into the system.

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William’s Status Report for 2/22/2025

This week, I spent some time ironing out the design review slides. In addition, I received the parts of Arducam, Raspberry Pi, and Blues Notecard. With the given timeframe, I went through the tutorials of starting the process of flashing the RPI Pico W.

I think my progress is currently still a little bit behind. I am hoping to get some more embedded development progress done before spring break. The aim is to get at least one of the parts to be connected/communicating with each other before start of break.

The deliverable I hope to complete in the next week is finish succesfully flashing the pico W and figure out how to connect the pico W to existing wifi.

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William Wang’s Status Report for 2/15/2025

This week, I worked on the design slides and ironing out the details of the hardware side of our project. After discussion with the TA and our professor, I sent out the order list for the hardware side of our project for development.

In addition, I also did some power research on what is needed to supply our system components. After some discussion, we decided to power the pico with a usb (5[v]) which is connected to a power bank. By doing this, we are in the recommended range of 3.3-5.5[v] for the Pico while providing enough power for all of the components.

We our slightly behind on our project schedule. I was hoping to get started with the microcontroller development with the RPI Pico by this week, but unfortunately we still have to wait for the parts to come. There were also no leftover RPI pico W in the inventory. I hope to get the RPI Pico as soon as possible to get started with the hardware development of the project next week.

My deliverable next week include a visible start to the Pico’s technical development, and hopefully figure out how to connect the device to cloud if the Blues notecard arrives in time.

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William Wang’s Status Report for 2/8/2025

This week, I was the presenter of the proposal and heavily focused on flushing out the details and requirements of our system design. In addition to rehearsing and preparing the proposal presentation, I explored various options of network connectivity of RPI Pico W to the clouds as well as flushing out the component details:

Based off of initial research of product documentations, I drew out this graph to specify how each component will communicate with each other. The Blues Notecard will be communicating with the Raspberry Pi Pico over UART protocol and the Arducam will communicate with the Raspberry Pi Pico over SPI protocol. Since I am responsible on the hardware/embedded side of this project, I finalized the decision on the hardware end to use a Raspberry Pi Pico W rather than a Jetson Nano due to the ease of development with MicroPython library as well as the significantly smaller size and weight of the hardware. The size of the hardware is an important concern since we need to have all the components fit on the glasses and be wearable to the user.

We were initially debating whether to use a NVIDIA Jetson Nano or a Raspberry Pi Pico. However, after some research of online and previous working projects, I noticed that the Raspberry Pi Pico has a well-documented library MicroPython that could well-integrate with Arducam and the Blues Notecard. Both these specified components are specifically compatible to Raspberry Pi Pico. Thus, these hardware design choices mainly lied upon system compatibility and ease of software development with MicroPython.

In addition to the system compatibility, I also spent a lot of energy researching the component’s power usage. After conducting some calculations and research, I selected the 2000 mAh LiPo battery power the RPI Pico W, Blues Notecard, and Arducam for at least 8 hours in the day. Implementation complications with power consumption may arise; thus, I plan on starting the hardware implementation aspect of our project ASAP to validate my calculations as we are passing the research+design phase of the project.

My progress is currently on schedule. By next week, I will start learning how to set up the Raspberry Pi Pico. I currently don’t have any RPI Pico development experience. However, I have 18-349 background implementing SPI as well as UART communication. Thus, I plan on going back on my previous work/lecture notes to get a starting understanding of the implementation of these components.

By next week, I will focus on two deliverables

1: starting up Raspberry Pi Pico W

2: Orders list for the components of our system designs

In addition to working on these deliverables, I will be focusing on reading into the documentation of Arducam and Blues Notecard to make technical progress in that space next week.