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Todd’s Status Report for 4/25

Personal Accomplishments this Week

The main thing this week was doing my final presentation and doing final testing and video making with David and DJ. Since our product is complete, we wanted to get a head start on some of the things we need for later next week.

On Schedule?

Everything is still on schedule, and I plan on getting the poster done by Monday night to get ready for the TechSpark expo.

Deliverables?

The product is done and all that is left is to complete the report, poster, and video as well as get ready for the demo. I am mostly responsible for the poster.

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Team Status Report for 4/18

What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready? 

The main risk to our project at the moment is the failure of the electronics in the mounting of our design. However, since we have successfully mounted one of the glasses, we are confident that the other should go even smoother. One other things that could prove difficult is making sure that everything is clean and readily available for a user to use that may not be as familiar with the project as we are. This involved cleaning up wiring and making sure that nothing will break. We already have plans in place to remedy this as well as contingency plants to simplify the glasses design so that anyone can sue them without much issue. This could be not mounting all of the parts of the glasses because they may not fit everyone’s face.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

The only thing that may have changed I have described above, where we may simplify the design for the demo for easy of use, while having one complete system to display what the completed product will look like. This does not have a large cost to the project other than not having a totally completed product like we envisioned for the demo, but makes the demo much ore accessible without having to change the physical design.

Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred

No changes have been made to the design or our schedule.

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Todd’s Status Report for 4/18

Personal Accomplishments this week

For this week, the main thing that was completed was the mounting of one of the devices on the 3D printed glasses and testing that it worked with one of the breadboard setups. This went very smoothly (other than glue issues) so we can move on to mounting the second device to have available to show at teh final presentation. Other than that,  I have been preparing of my presentation last week.

On Schedule?

We are still mostly on schedule and plan to finish mounting our device before presentations start. We got over the small hurdle of making sure all of the component s worked off the breadboard so now the rest of mounting and integration should go smoothly.

Deliverables for next Week

The final presentation is the main deliverable for next week, but other than that I want to make sure that our system for mounting the microphone and providing some noise isolation works.

As you’ve designed, implemented and debugged your project, what new tools or new knowledge did you find it necessary to learn to be able to accomplish these tasks? What learning strategies did you use to acquire this new knowledge?

In this project, there are a couple main things that I have learned in order to complete this project. The first thing is the researching oof different components that work well in a distinct system without incorporating them onto my own PCB. This involved making sure that the PICO, Pi5, Mic board, LEDs and Receivers all worked together while having their own PCBs and communication protocols. This involved poring over the data sheets of these products as well as looking at the extensive documentation that exists for things like the Raspberry Pis. The other main tool and knowledge that I learned was 3D CAD design for 3D printing. While I have experience with CAD for PCBs and simple shaped, designing somethin to be 3D printed was not something I have done before. I mainly used tutorials, either on a website or video to do this but it also involved a lot of experimentation and trial and error on the program itself to find the workflow that worked best for me.

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Todd’s Status Report for 4/4

Personal Accomplishments this week

This week was spent in preparation for our interim demo of our project. For myself, this involved completing our initial CAD design and printing it to show to our professors and TAs. Other than that, we discussed possible improvements to the physical design and additions that may need to be made.

On Schedule?

We are very much on schedule and are ready to begin mounting the device to the 3D printed parts.

Next week deliverables

For next week, we want to have our device completely so that we can test our technology in our intended form factor. Also, if needed, make adjustments to the CAD and do additional prints.

 

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Personal Accomplishments This Week?

This week was mainly spent completing and iterating up on our glasses design. I was able to complete the housing for the PICO board and we were able to get a test print done which informed us on some changes we needed to make to fit the lenses and display. I also spent some time in the lab working with DJ and David on debugging the two-way communication protocol

On Schedule

We are still on schedule, and are ready for the demo this week.

Next Week Deliverables

I want to have the full 3D design complete and printed to that we can begin with integration of all the parts and so that we have some room for any other adjustments that come up after printing. We have plenty of budget left over so that we can print so I am also not worried about that part.

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Team Status Report for 3/21

What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready? 

As of now, there are no major risks to the success of the project. Our work is going smoothly and things are working as intended with minimal trouble and wasted time. We were able to demonstrate full one way communication including decoding, lcd screen, and v2t with our testing setup, This is a huge milestone and means a lot of the software work can move on to developing the 2-way communication. Our main bottleneck at this time may involve the integration of every part of the system into one device, which will involve a decent amount of design work, but shouldn’t be too much trouble. However, if we cannot achieve integration by the interim demo, we are still able to do a makeshift mounting of the system onto existing glasses.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

No changes were made to the design this week other than small tweaks to how we are displaying the words on our display during testing. This will be an ongoing process to determine what enhances readability the most. Otherwise, this week was mainly spent testing our existing design.

Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred

There are no changes to our schedule as we are all either on schedule or ahead.

Here is a video demonstrating our full one way communication: https://youtu.be/-NNWBw4ArGU

Here is a photo of the full testing setup with he receiver and display on the left and transmitter on the right side:

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Todd’s Status Report for 3/21

Personal Accomplishments this Week?

This week was mainly spent assisting David and DJ to get the hardware components working and somewhat integrated, and getting started on the glasses CAD design.  I was able to complete a rudimentary 2D design of the glasses completed in AutoCAD and will be working the rest of the weekend on transitioning to 3D to start the process of 3D printing this week.

On Schedule?

I am solidly on schedule for my parts of the project while my individual responsibility is increasing. Without printing or CAD issues, we can begin physically putting a prototype together within the next couple of weeks.

Next Week Deliverables

As stated before, I am going to continue to work on the CAD design for our custom glasses. Ideally, I would like to have it completely finished this week to begin printing and testing the fit of each part of our project in order to have it ready for the interim demo.

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Todd’s Status Report for 3/14

Personal Accomplishments this Week

This week, I mainly assisted DJ and David as they worked to get the communication between IR transmitter and receiver up and running. this involved working with the oscilloscope and conducting tests with all 3 of us to test distance constraints  and directionality for the IR components. I also spent a good bit of time working on the individual portion of the ethics assignment this week as well.

On Schedule?

I and the rest of the team are on or ahead of schedule,  but as the semester gets closer to the end, my work will begin to get more involved. So, for the next week, I want to try and get a step ahead of some of my tasks so that I am not feeling as much of a time crunch as my workload gets more heavy on the project.

Next Week Deliverables

Next week I am planning on continuing to work with David and DJ on getting all the hardware up and running to where we want it to be. I also want to begin thinking more about the physical integration of all the parts of our project, since we may want to add a lens as well.  Thinking more about integration now will let us work out the problems and potential issues so that components fit together properly and we can shift focus on more complex parts of the project if needed.

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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.

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Todd’s Status Report for 2/21

Personal Accomplishments this Week

I mainly worked alongside DJ and David testing and validating some of the hardware for our device. Earlier in the week, we worked on trying to understand the signal coming out the RPi GPIO for the IR LED with an oscilloscope. This led us to pivot to using the PICOs since we had trouble getting a signal in the first place. Then later in the week, I worked with DJ on validating the voice to text model on the RPi with our MEMS mic, which worked out really well, and that part of the project is ready to move forward.

On Schedule?

I am on schedule alongside the rest of the team for this week, and we are still staying slightly ahead of where we want to be which is good.

Next Week Deliverables

I am going to keep supporting my other groupmates with getting the hardware tested and functional, and will be ready to work with the PICO boards once they come in. I will also be helping the David and DJ on completing the design report due at the end of the week.