Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone, Spring 2025 – Meadow Webster, Jason Botros, Jamshed Panthaki
Overall, our main risks have to do with the parts we still have in transit. We still have yet to receive the power system for our devices. In the meantime, we’ve been testing our IMU and ESP while they’re attached to the computer. Once we receive the parts, we intend to integrate them quickly so we can get a better grasp on how our device works untethered.
We haven’t made any changes to the existing design of the system, and our schedule hasn’t changed.
Most of the work for this week was spent on the design report and fleshing out details for our device that weren’t set in stone or coming up with implementation plans. The rest of the week I used to set up the BNO055 with Arduino and confirmed real time data output along with minor power supply research. Having a sensor set up with Arduino instead of only the ESP32 will help with parallel testing and allow me to work on the sensor data and power independently from the Bluetooth communication. Testing was not consistently successful, however, due to losing contact in the sensor inputs from loose wire connections (no solder yet and waiting on STEMMA QT cables). For next week, as the cables arrived during break, I want to ensure reliable data output and move to confirming accuracy with ground truth comparisons and work on calibration if there are mismatches.
So far things seem to be on schedule.
This week I spent a large amount of my time working on the design report with Jason and Meadow. I also designed an app using the iOS Bluetooth API to read IMU data from the ESP microcontroller. The app can be found in this github repo: https://github.com/jpanthaki/risevbt
My progress is up to date. The object tracking computer vision feature is still a work in progress; still trying to figure out how to get the UI to work the way I want it to.
I hope to create an initial representation of the data visualization UI with graphical representation of mock IMU data, that way I can begin to integrate it with the Bluetooth feature. I also hope to make more progress with the object tracking feature.
This status report period was spent half of the time completing the design report document and half of the time completing the goals for what I set last status report. Regarding the status report, I spent ample time completing the system implementation sections as well as the testing and validation sections. On top of this, the Design Trade Study section was split up amongst my teammates, which I also spent a decent amount of time on. For each section that I was responsible for, I backtracked on our prior research while also refining how we wanted to carve the rest of our project planning.
In regards to meeting our prior goals in the prior status report, the rest of my time was spent converting the IMU sensor + ESP32 hardware setup to support BLE. This came after the realization that it was not being recognized as a peripheral device on the software platform. This debugging required some changes to the firmware but after it was accomplished, we were able to successfully integrate the IMU sensor data with the mobile software platform, which Jamshed has been working on, and fully extracted said data. Our goals for the week after next (the next status report period timeframe) are to reduce noise and implement a smoothing function/low pass filter to refine the data extraction as well as possibly implement the mentioned Kalman filter to significantly improve the accuracy of the IMU sensor data. Nonetheless, we are on track with our goals in terms of both hardware and software setups and integration and hope to remain on track by completing the mentioned goals for next week.