Category: Mario’s Status Reports

Since last status report, I have updated our microcontroller firmware to be as consistent and robust as possible. I moved bluetooth transmission to after IMU sampling in order to keep the data collection as in tact as possible despite bluetooth blips. I also finished a script for cleanly collecting swing data and have spent several hours collecting hundreds of swings from at least a dozen players. I have worked on the visualization of the tennis swing as well and that will continue to be a focus this week.

Progress was good this week. I do not have any significant blockers this week.

My goal for this coming week is to get visualization to be more accurate, collect more data for swing categorization, and get feedback from tennis coaches to get better insights into future work. 

This week I have been working on integrating bluetooth communication between the iphone and the microcontroller with Geronimo. I also worked on calibrating the Gyro scope and Accelerometer with David before he took that over.

Progress was good this week. We have been preparing for the demo and we believe to have hit our target goals.

My goal for this coming week is do a successful demo and continue to clean up IMU data using filtering and other techniques so that we can start to collect data for our models. 

This week I have been working on allowing for data capture completely through bluetooth transmission and ensuring that we can do so within the appropriate time constraints. Last week I had an issue acquiring data via bluetooth at a reasonable speed. Leveraging some bluefruit library functionality and using troubleshooting tests to analyze the issue, I was able to get past some initial handshake issues. Now we can successfully trigger and read 3 seconds of data collection from the IMU via bluetooth.

Progress was good this week. We have begun preliminary data collection as we intended.

My goal for this coming week is to get a full bluetooth testing suite to know what our capabilities are. Additionally, I want to get the IMU calibrated and add an option to trigger gyroscope calibration via bluetooth. Accelerometer calibration is only needed once and not again, while gyroscope calibration may be needed multiple times a session. So I will do the accelerometer calibration myself and write code to support gyroscope calibration. 

This week I have been working on integrating bluetooth with the existing code and organizing data flowing serially into json formatted data compatible for ML use. I have written code that communicates with the embedded controller to signal the start of a 3 second window for data capture, prompting it to start sampling the IMU. It then formats the data it receives into json.

Progress was slower this week due to issues using bluetooth. It seemed that connecting to a central device via bluetooth would cause the device to reboot or something. Our priority is collecting data as soon as possible so I decided to pivot to ensuring that we could collect data and we were successful in doing so.

My goal for this coming week is to get bluetooth transmission working at full capacity and reliably. I additionally want to implement code that will allow us to trigger a data transmission event by relying on accelerometer values that should correlate to a swing.

This week I have adapted our existing embedded controller code to use SPI instead of the slower I2C. I additionally created and tested code that allowed for BLE transfer of data from the controller to the laptop. I tested and confirmed that we were able to read a data packet from the IMU at 500 hz.

Progress is continuing smoothly.

My goal for this coming week is to implement code to collect data packets via bluetooth on the laptop to begin basic data analytics and machine learning. I want to clean up our existing code. Lastly, I want to make a test suite for  bluetooth transmission to determine our maximum rates of sending data.

This week I prepared for our teams design presentation and presented it. I also started to do work on devising a scheme for organizing and batching IMU data in the embedded system.

I am on schedule.

Next week I will receive the parts to be able to start implementing some of the protocols and give Geronimo some foundation to start coding the receiving end of the IOS application. I have been slightly blocked this week but we have accounted for this in the GANTT chart. Next week I will implement my data batching scheme and output data via bluetooth. I will also work on completing a test suite that will show metrics of the working system.