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Team Status Report for 3/14

We believe that at this point there are no major risks to the project, the different parts on the project are coming together nicely. The most significant risk at this point is ensuring that our LCD will be readable from a reasonable distance, as well as finalizing how many words will be displayed on it at a time. We want the LCD to be mounted fairly close to the glasses, so we will be trying to adapt to using a lens as suggested to make the LCD more readable from the short distance. This will likely require some trial and error to make it work well.

We are mostly managing this risk by ensuring we have plenty of slack time to allow for this trial and error to happen. If all else fails we have our contingency plan of switching from glasses mounted to phone mounted to give us an easier screen for the user to read from.

As mentioned above, we will be adding a lens to our design to improve the readability of our LCD. The lenses only cost around $15 for 2 so this is well within our budget to add.

No changes have occurred to our schedule.

Below we have pictures of our signal generation on the oscilloscope.

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DJ’s Status Report for 3/14

I spent the beginning of this week working together with David to get our signal generation working on the Pico. We spent a lot of time working with the oscilloscope in Techspark to ensure that both are carrier frequency and our PWM were being generated accurately enough for our protocol. We did some initial testing around with the IR receiver hooked up to the oscilloscope to get an idea of the distance and directivity, both of which are looking good for our purposes.

Later in the week I started working on our code for parsing the output of the V2T. The V2T software simply returns a string of the ongoing message, so we need a way to accurately and efficiently parse that string to determine the newly added words that we need to transmit. We also need to do this in a way that is resilient to the V2T model updating its prediction for previous words.

I am right on schedule, if not a little bit ahead of schedule.

Next week I will be continuing to work on our V2T processing and getting it to a point where the V2T and the Pi can be connected to the Pico side of our system. I also plan to start working a little bit with David on our signal decoding software as well.

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Davids Status Report for 3/14

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

I wrote more code for pico pwm encoding. Along with DJ, we worked with multimeter for a decent amount in tech spark to ensure it was working correctly. I then continued and wrote more code for specific bit sending, ie sending a sync and an entire packet following. I then spent a few hours in lab working through this and debugging to the point that it worked! I then spent some time drafting decoding code. Some photos of our lab progress should be in the team report.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I am ahead of schedule now. Getting the encoding software working is a main part of our project and a part that I thought could be subject to delays. Now that I am through this I (we) are in a very good state to get our entire integration complete in coming weeks.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week my main focus is debugging the decoding software. This will complete our IR  and encoding submodules which means all we have left in theory is integrating with LCD and V2T submodule. Hopefully the decoding goes relatively smoothly as well in which case we are in a very good spot!

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Todd’s Status Report for 3/7

Personal Accomplishments this Week

Work on the physical project was lighter this week due to class time being taken up by design presentations and ad the design report being due on Friday. For the design report I mainly worked in assisting both David and DJ on ideas and supporting them when they needed information about the intended hardware and such, and I also made a couple of the diagrams sin the report, and citing sources. We were also waiting on our RPi PICO boards to come in so some of my work was also limited in that regard, but we should be in a good place to hit the ground running when we get back.

On Schedule?

We are still on schedule with our updated plan and also personally on schedule with my individual tasks as well.  I have also started thinking and researching more on how we are going to integrate all of the parts of our project for the final product, which I will continue to work on next week.

Next Week Deliverables

I am planning on helping DJ get the PICOs up and running and I would like to get some information transmission through IR working. As I mentioned earlier, I also want to get a draft of how we are going to integrate all of the electronics into an ergonomic and usable form factor so that we don’t lose the user experience in the search for functionality.