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Team Status Report for 2/21

The biggest risk we are facing right now is our parts not arriving on time. We are behind schedule if they do not come this week as our plan was to assemble the glove and begin testing. However, without hardware we are still making progress working on the communication between Raspberry Pi and software as well as working on the user-interface. This week we will finish the Design document and assemble the glove if our parts arrive. We will also continue implementing the software portions that we do not need hardware for.

 

This week we also formalized parts of the design for the design report, like picking which protocols we’ll use for MVP and final. The glove is based on Raspberry Pi and will use C for the controls. The IMU will use I2C to communicate with the Raspberry Pi. The flex resistors will communicate with the Raspberry Pi through its GPIO, possibly with capacitors to filter out noise. For MVP, the glove will communicate with the computer via USB, but we’d like to do wireless communication for final. We’re considering adjusting the weight requirements based on the batteries we’ve been able to find: if we can’t find a light enough battery to make the glove easy to use, we’ll need to switch to powering the glove with a USB cable or similar, but make the cable long so it’s still ergonomic.

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Nia’s Status Report 2/21

This week, I worked on our design presentation slides and began creating the file structure for our code. We will be adding code for the frontend and machine learning portions as we wait for our parts to arrive next week.

I will also begin designing the UI on figma. We plan to have a test mode to begin where the user is shown a letter/number and they are to sign the letter and receive feedback (correct/incorrect).

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Katherine’s Status Report 2/21

This week our group presented, and finished the presentation. However, I did not present, I worked on the programming for accepting information from a Raspberry Pi and will test it on a Raspberry Pi from lending this week. I will not be able to run it on the Raspberry Pi we will be using for our project as it is still not been delivered yet. We are not on schedule as our parts have not arrived yet so we have not begun assembling the glove. However I will continue to do as much work on the software without the hardware as I can.  I will also be working on the Design document this week.

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Teadora’s Status Report 2/21

This week I worked on the design presentation, then presented it on Monday. To get ready for the presentation, I had to confirm several details about our solution approach, like which protocols and languages we’ll use for the ASL glove. I also ordered more parts and worked with Quinn to handle a supply issue. The supply issue has me concerned that we won’t have parts before Spring Break, which would push us back 2 weeks. If the parts are here this week, I’ll test them to make sure I can get data out, attach them to the glove, and start figuring out what formulas we’ll use to convert sensor data into reasonable measurements / sign classification.

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Katherine’s Status Report 2/14

This week, I worked on the design slideshow and the planning of our project. I started researching how we will accept and process serial information from the raspberry pi. We are behind schedule as we did not order the parts until this week but ideally our sensors and glove arrives soon so we can start the assembly of our glove. In the meantime as I stated I will continue to work on the data transmission to the machine learning model and determining which ML model we will use.

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Nia’s Status Report 2/14

This week, I worked on ordering parts for our prototype. Specifically, I ordered the gloves and began research on what monitor we want to use to display our UI. I also created our GitHub and began planning our ML model system design.

Our progress is a bit behind schedule as we hope to begin collecting data before spring break. We are still waiting for our sensors to arrive and then we can begin test such as number of sensors per finger.

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Teadora’s Status Report for 2/14

This week I ordered the first set of parts for the glove (Spectra Symbol Flex Sensors), and looked into other parts. For example, I looked at the datasheets for several different IMUs Adafruit sells to consider how much data we need (ex: do we need magnetic field sensing? Probably not, and it’ll save us $5 on budget). I’ve decided to use a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W since it’s lightweight and has WiFi and Bluetooth capability. We borrowed a Raspberry Pi 5 (8Gb) from lending, but it won’t work for the final model since it’s too big. We’ll also need a monitor and keyboard to interface with it, which we need to get from ITS. I also worked on the Design Presentation

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Team Status Report for 2/14

Like last week, there are no significant risks at this stage. We’re in the process of ordering parts, trying to balance getting enough parts early while not blowing our budget if the parts aren’t right. However, we have a pretty good idea of which specific parts we need at this point. We need to look into software choices soon, including how to receive data and use it to build the model.

Part A was written by Nia

Our project aims to improve welfare by providing education to all for learning ASL and increasing fluency. We’re taking into account safety by ensuring batteries that won’t overheat during use.

Part B was written by Teadora

The product solution we’re designing meets needs for social factors. ASL (and other sign languages) are a large part of the deaf community, and it’s common for signed languages to be a child’s first language, especially if people in their family are hard of hearing. Learning sign language can also be useful for older adults since hearing loss can occur later in life, especially as a complication of other health concerns. In recent years, it’s become more common to see sign interpreters in everyday events, like concerts, government press briefings, and other events with live speakers. While sign language interpreting is a complicated skill that takes many years to master, learning sign language is an important way to connect with the deaf community and create accessible environments. Our solution will help people learn ASL and facilitate communication between different cultural groups.

https://www.asha.org/siteassets/ais/ais-comorbidities-and-hearing-loss.pdf

https://signhealth.org.uk/resources/learn-about-deafness/deaf-or-deaf/

 

Part C was written by Katherine

The economic factors are important as there are many versions of our product that are similar being built so it is very important we create a cheap and easily accessible one. Our production should be high quality and also cheaper than other products. As for distribution we want it to be easily accessible which we are demonstrating by creating ourselves with parts we order ourselves.

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Nia’s Status Report 2/7

This week, I presented our project proposal. I mainly worked on preparing our slides to be readable for the audience. In addition, I worked on preliminary research on the available parts list. Lastly, I began brainstorming the user interface of our application and how e can create positive feedback loop to our machine learning algorithm.

Our progress is on schedule. We hope to have ordered parts by the end of next week and to have found public datasets for our model.

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Team Status Report 2/7

There are no significant risks at this stage. We need to order parts soon and get moving quickly so we don’t experience delays. We’ll mitigate this risk by ordering from preferred suppliers and ordering enough materials in case something breaks. The things that could jeopardize us are not ordering the right parts or not ordering them soon enough. Therefore we are being very intentional about picking our parts while intended to order parts this upcoming week. 

The plans that we are ready to execute are to order the flex sensors and IMU when we get access, and to decide on the specific model of Rasberry-Pi we are going to use. The features we are looking for are, bluetooth, wifi and lightweight. There are no changes that need to be made or that have been made for the existing design system. We are still using the same design that we presented on our proposal slides.