Author: jbotros

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.

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.

This week I mainly spent time on researching our project in order to build up our proposal slides for our proposal presentation. Given I was the team member presenting this week, I wanted to be sure I was adequately prepared not only with research literature for what I would be speaking about during the proposal presentation but also that I was familiar with our presentation slides and could be a informative presenter. Thanks to Jamshed and Meadow I was able to practice the presentation several times which allowed for a smooth transition into when I had to do the real proposal presentation in front of the class. This took a lot of time and effort in order to polish the presentation after conducting the research behind it but I was satisfied with how it went. Our main deliverable is our project proposal slides which I would show here but have already been attached as media on the website and as a page on the website too. Lastly I think that we are right on track of our schedule at the moment.

After the presentation had concluded on Wednesday, I spent some time researching the hardware components we would need to achieve our rough MVP which we decided on this week as a group. I plan on continuing this research into the next week and finalizing it with a list of purchases needed to get the ball rolling with the project.