Author: ckglenn

This week, we began working directly with the hardware we ordered. This was an initial attempt to test the complexity of the Jetson AGX Xavier, as well as understanding the design implications that it would have in the future/changes we might have to make. After spending several hours working with it, there were many difficulties including internet connectivity and being able to start fresh from scratch. Although these are temporary setbacks, we are still confident going forward that our timeline is well within schedule. In my own personal work, I researched several text-to-speech applications that could be integrated into the project and worked with usb speaker systems. One said application is google’s lifelike text to speech synthesis. This takes in words/sentences and converts it to WAV form files that can be read by an audio output device. Alongside the text-to-speech portion of this project, I spent time analyzing methods for spellcheck and refining a possible formula going forward. This would include generating a set of possible words within a range of 1-2 edits of the input word, then outputting the one with highest probability. 

This being said, we are finishing up the research and design phase of our project, and within the scheduled time given. Soon we will transition to software development and architecture, and begin writing preliminary code. In the coming week, the goal is to have a working hardware system going forward, a unified code base with version control, and a well refined design for our code to get started. I would also like to test out several text-to-speech platforms for latency/accuracy measurements.

We are currently working on the final design of our product as software and for the application’s wearability. This week was focused primarily on the proposal presentation slides and analysis of feedback, and then researching separately for the development. 

In our schedule, the main bulk of our project comes after the design presentation because we want to have a finalized structure before delving deeply into the work. This includes software design trade-offs as well as structuring the project to allow for parallelism and growth. Therefore, since the development begins primarily after the design review, we are very much on time, and have good space for the beginning of our project. 

The coming week will involve hands-on hardware integration, as well as the development of the software + hardware design for finalization. Working with the hardware will allow us to find more challenges and difficulties to iron out before integrating a final product design. Alongside this, we will be concluding research in our separate fields in order to begin the software and hardware development.