Category: Todd’s Status Reports

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Personal Accomplishments this Week

Along with David, I was out of town for this week so thew work that I as well a the team got done was mostly related to the design review slides. I worked alongside the team to finish the slides, working on the diagrams and slides related to hardware. Other than that I did some further parts research on the parts that we ordered that we can begin work as soon as we can with the components.

On Schedule?

I am personally on schedule for what we wanted to accomplish this week and will be ready to begin the parts testing that we are planning on doing next week.

Next Week Deliverables

When we are doing testing next week with the RPI and LEDS, I want to keep running notes and documentation so that we have all of the information that we need so we can look back at how things performed and don’t need to do any redundant testing later.

This week consisted mostly of work with the rest of the team relating to the proposal presentation as well as the parts list so we could begin ordering parts that we needed as soon as possible.  For the parts list, I worked alongside DJ and David to select light sources and receivers. I also did research to find an appropriate microphone for us to use initially and in our final product. I settled on initially using a small I2S MEMS breakout board we can get from Adafruit that seems to be a good base for initial testing. We also found a similar form factor bone conduction microphone that could serve our purposes but does not come with nearly as much documentation or additional components as the breakout board does. Initially, the Adafruit breakout board should serve well and then we could transition to the bone conduction solution if we are confident on other aspects of the project. Since I am more focused on the hardware for this project, I am not able to make as much tangible progress on the project until parts arrive, but I have been doing research and thinking about how we want to integrate all of the parts of the project. As of now, I am also acting support for other parts of the project such as the design review slides and documentation.

Our progress is on schedule, but I am hopeful that the parts that we need to get started come in soon so that I can start with testing and assembly of circuitry. Since we were proactive with part selection and ordering, this should not be a problem.

Next week I will primarily be focused on helping the rest of the team with the design review slides and report. For deliverables, I want to develop a testing plan and framework so that we can hit the ground running once our parts arrive.