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DJ’s Status Report for 4/4

This week my focus was on bug fixing in preparation for the demo. I continued working on a bug that we had found last week involving hanging when two people are talking at once. I was eventually able to fix the bug and get the bidirectional system ready for the demo.
I spent the rest of the week brainstorming with the rest of the team about logistics for the mounting.

I am ahead of schedule, and will have plenty of time for testing in the next month.

Next week I will work with the rest of the team on mounting everything onto the glasses and beginning some stress testing of the mounted system.

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David’s Status Report for 4/4

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

I helped to debug the last bit of our 2 way communication. It now works as seen in demo. As a team we also had some 3d prints of mounting and are going to begin assembling.

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

We are ahead of schedule. We now have about a month for mounting and stress testing. Our updated schedule on this website and during our demo reflect this.

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

Next week we will hope to either have one working pair of glasses or a large portion of one pair done.

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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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DJ’s Status Report 3/28

This week I worked on the code for making our system bidirectional. This started with adding the call and response for the acknowledgement pulses, and then I expanded to add both sending and receiving capabilities to each side. Throughout testing this week, we’ve gotten the system to a point where it works well as long as only one person is talking at a time, but there are still some bugs when both users overlap talking. This is likely to do with how we are deciding who gets priority to send initially. The code currently randomly tries sending and receiving a letter initially, I chose this randomized priority because I believe it is the best way to ensure compatibility with all users in the hypothetical case that many people with this product exist. However, we will need to do more debugging of this area of the code to ensure that it handles overlapping talking correctly.

The project is ahead of schedule.

This gives us plenty of time next week to continue debugging the system. I’d like to also work more on our full system correctness testing so that within the next week or two we can start working on our use case and design requirement testing.

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Team Status Report for 3/28

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? 

Our most significant risks now come from debugging bidirectional communication. Our bi directional works well in a normal conversation flow, but if two people talk relatively slowly and overlapping, the system has trouble determining who to transmit and gets stuck. This risk is being managed by coming up with code debugging and testing strategies to try and determine what is specifically happening on the backend. We are also coming up with contingency plans to just hardcode a ‘priority’ that can guarantee only one person is sending/receiving. There are a few other contingency plans we have including using a reserved EOP character to signal a switch in priority. Other than that, our only other main thing left is mounting. We dont foresee this causing many risks however we could just end up with some messy wires. We will try to avoid this but also only have so much time to iterate our mount design.

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?

We have some small changes to our mounting plan. We now have a lens on one eye so that you can focus onto the screen. However, this lens is only on the bottom of the eye-hole so that you can still focus your eye on the background. This change was necessary as if your eyes are only looking through lens for too long then can become strained. There is not too much of a cost associated with this, aside from potential for eye straining which we mitigated by allowing you to focus on and off the lens. As mentioned earlier, no changes yet for bidirectional protocol but we are considering contingency changes.

Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred

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

We have some pictures and videos similar to last week but for 2-way communication. We will show them at demo if needed 🙂 (hopefully not )

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David’s Status Report for 3/28

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

First me and DJ implemented bidirectional communication. After that, I was in lab debugging bi-directional communication with him. These together took a lot of time (our >12 hours) and is still not done. We have an annoying bug when 2 people speak at the same time our system occasionally ends up stuck in a loop deciding who has priority to transmit vs receive.

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

We are ahead of schedule. All we are left with now is debugging our bidirectional system and mounting. Todd has printed the first attempt of our mount and seems like we may only need a couple more iterations.

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

Next week our my main focus is debugging bi directional communication. In fact, this is probably our last main tech goal and it may take us some time depending on how difficult the bug(s) are to find. If we absolutely cannot figure it out, there are some workarounds that may result in a slightly less clean solution, but still within our demo bounds.

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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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DJ’s Status Report for 3/21

I started this week by doing some final preparation for the signal generation side of our system. I did some debugging on the Pico signal code as well as adding code to transmit letters from the Pi to the Pico over USB. We currently have the Pi sending letters from a queue in parallel to reduce the latency from the Vosk computation and output parsing. The Pi also sends one letter at a time, and waits for a response from the Pico before sending the next letter to avoid losing data if the Pico isn’t accepting more input.

In the middle of the week our project was ready to test the full system integration for one way communication. I worked with the rest of the group to get all of our subsystem integrated and perform some cursory tests to ensure the systems were integrated correctly.

Finally, I started the planning / making flow charts for implementing the two way communication.

We are still slightly ahead of schedule. We are in a very good place for our one way system to be presentable at the interim demo.

Next week I’ll finalize the plan for our two-way implementation and begin writing the code for that. I also want to spend some time experimenting with the Pico’s PIO for use with our signal detection which would allow us to parallelize the signal detection and would possibly simplify as well as improve the performance of the high end integration of the two way communication