This week after completing the Design presentation I worked on the initial setup of the hardware flow we would be working on for the project. Although we were given the suggestion to use a fully integrated MCU, which we did indeed agree too, we still had the parts to the IMU + ESP32 hardware flow. Therefore, for skeletal setup, I worked on the initial hardware and software setup of these two parts as well as integrating them.
I was able to initialize the two from a hardware perspective by working in the Techspark lab for a few hours for the last two days of the week after acquiring the necessary hardware components. I then proceeded to install the necessary libraries in the Arduino IDE to set up the software necessary to use the ESP32’s Bluetooth capabilities. After doing so, I wrote the necessary firmware needed to properly extract the data from the IMU and its 9 degrees of freedom (DOF). I achieved this after much time debugging this initial setup. The values I extracted from the IMU in terms of the acceleration, gyroscope, and magnetometer readings seemed reasonable but will be tested next week for exact accuracy. We are currently on plan and on schedule with what we expect and hope to have this integrated with the software platform by the end of next week to report in the design doc.