Category: Denis Status Reports

This week, we gave our presentation on Monday, and then I worked the rest of the week on setting up all of the screens so that they can all be running at once as well as the game state manager. At this point, besides creating the hardware, almost all of our time will be for integration and debugging. We will also create the poster and the demo materials. We are on pace to complete the project by Friday

The past couple weeks I’ve focused my time into integrating the different individual elements of our project as well as some of the smaller tasks that our project needs.

A major thing over the past couple weeks has been configuring our touch screens and creating scripts that will run on our raspberry Pi 0s and the Raspberry Pi 4. This was very difficult and took a lot of debugging and troubleshooting. However, we now have a consistent setup and are able to get the touch screen working almost every time. We will replicate this setup across the other 3 raspberry pi 0s.

We also designed a casing for the screens to contain the battery packs and converters.

I believe that we are on pace for the final demo and will be in a good place for the rest of the semester.

I gained a lot of skills throughout the semester, both clearly defined technical skills as well as softer problem-solving skills. I got the chance to work with new python modules, and a new protocol in MQTT. Learning about something like a new protocol and considering the tradeoffs of different options was a good exercise in design. Another good experience was debugging the LCD touchscreens, as encountering a snag like that, without a clear solution was a good chance to practice troubleshooting. Having to look through the boot logs and looking through old forums was definitely a learning experience.

This week I began creating our battery packs to make the Raspberry Pi 0s portable. Right now, they are very cumbersome because the wiring isn’t done well, but as a proof of concept they are fine for right now. For the final demo, they will be soldered and much more compact.

Also, I began working with the touchscreens as they were delivered this week. As of right now we are struggling to get the touchscreens to display the GUI and begin writing an application for the user input. We hope to have some sort of user input for the demo. I will be working a lot on Sunday to get this working and will provide an update of how far I get with it.

As of right now, I believe I am on pace for completing the project, and definitely on pace for having a successful demo

This week I began working with the main RPI4 board, and having that work as the main communication hub. I set up the RPI 0s to send messages to the hub and the RPI4 to process these and send back messages. For all MQTT communication we will use a format similar to this, sending arrays between the devices.

• Index 0: Sender ID
• Index 1: Receiver ID
• Index 2: Task ID
• Index 3-end: Data

As an example, sending a tile rack from device 1 to the main device could look like this:

[1,0,0,”d”,”e”,”n”,”i”,”s”]

As a final thing to do this week, I added the hint logic and began running that off of the main pi, sending a tile rack from the RPI0 to the main board, counting all the possible words and sending back one of the words for now.

For next week, I’m hoping to begin working on the portable powering and the touchscreens. I feel pretty on schedule, but I’m worried I could fall behind at any point.

This week I was able to make strides forward with the hardware components of the project. The biggest step was getting two Raspberry Pi’s communicating with each other and sending data back and forth. I also moved them from my home WiFi to CMU-Device, which will be important for the demos. I was hoping to also start working with the LCD touchscreens but they have not come in yet, I think that I filled out the form too late.

In this next week, I would like to begin working with the touchscreens and developing the program that will be running on each of the RPI0s. I would also like to begin working on the battery packs that will be powering the Rpis. I would say that I am slightly behind schedule but should be able to easily catch up provided that the hardware comes in this week. I am also planning on designing the case that we will be putting the RPi 0 and the batteries into.

I did not have as much time as I anticipated this week outside of the ethics assignment, but still managed to get a little bit of progress towards the hardware side of the project. I have a single Raspberry Pi sending messages to my laptop, on a timer. Hopefully, by the end of the weekend I will have the RPi receiving a similar message and flashing a light or some sore of signal to prove that it’s been received.

For this upcoming week, I need to have 2 RPi’s commnicating with each other. As soon as I have that I will pivot to working on the LCD touchscreens, beginning with a static image of what we want it to look like and then working to a dynamic set up where the user can press a button and then see the signal appear on the other RPi.

I would say that I’ve fallen slightly behind schedule, however this next week should be free enough for me to catch back up.

This past week I spent the majority of my time working on the design report. I wrote most of the second half of the design report, asking my groupmates the specifics of their parts of the implementation. This upcoming week, I’ll begin working with the RPi0s, and my goal is to have them communicating using MQTT by next Saturday. I think that individually and as a group we are on pace to complete our project, but our next 2-3 weeks will be very important for the success of our project.

This week I researched the specific RPi models and LCD screens that we should use for our project. I also began looking into the MQTT protocol and how that can be implemented on the RPis. This upcoming week, I plan on beginning to interface and send data between 2 RPis as well as beginning to create an interface that we’ll be able to use on the LCD screens. My plan is to create a mock-up for what we want the screens to look like, and ensure that we can receive an input from the touch screen. We are on pace for our project.

This week I spent some time looking into the different FPGAs that we could use for our designs. Then, after discussing with my group, we pivoted to a design without the FPGA. We all agreed that using RPi0s would enable us to do wireless communication between the main RPi and the individual screens. We also agreed that it would be easier to drive the video screens if they each had their own individual RPi driving them, as opposed to one FPGA driving all 4 screens. After changing our design, I began looking into appropriate video screens that would be able to connect to the RPi0s.

This upcoming week, I want to finalize which screens we will be using and place the order of the RPi0 wireless and the screens, so that I can start working on the wireless communication.

This week I began looking at the possible options for the FPGA and the LCD screens. By next week I want to create a doc with some of the tradeoffs of our options so that we can decide which hardware we want to use for our project. Looking at the purchasing sheets there are a few FPGA options and we will likely have to choose one of those options given our budget constraints. Another big question is what LCD screens we will choose to use. I need to learn how other similar projects have interfaced between an FPGA and a touch screen, as well as what hardware they used. I think that my other major task for this week will be starting and working as a team to make our design presentation, filling in the slides for what work I’m going to be doing. All in all, I think that we are on schedule but these next few weeks will be critical to the success of our project, in particular ironing out all of the technical details, and starting to take the first steps.