Personal Accomplishment
What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).
- Ethics lecture (2 hrs): I spent time on the ethics lecture and learnt quite a lot about political implication of engineering.
- Team meeting (3 hrs): My teammates and I spent time sync up on our individual progress both during the lab time and after the assigned class time. Issues on individual work were proposed, and after working together, we managed to solve what was previously not working.
- GPS hardware setup (2 hrs): I spent time setting up the GPS with USB connection. Initially, the reading was not available due to some port initialization issue with the RPi4. After correctly finding the USB port with the reserved serial communication, I was able to read the output from minicom and interpret the data from there.
- Radar software setup (5 hrs):I completed the initial software bring-up for the radar, enabling it to output basic detection results. During setup, I encountered communication issues between the radar and the Raspberry Pi. Initially, the default UART port on the RPi didn’t transmit or receive data. After confirming basic UART functionality, the radar still wasn’t communicating. I discovered that the RPi 4’sdefault mini-UART doesn’t support parity bits, which our radar requires for even parity. I reconfigured the setup to use UART2, which does support parity bits, and that resolved the issue. Now, the radar successfully outputs a list of detection targets with their distance and velocity, completing this bring-up phase.
Schedule
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
This week, I am back on schedule with all systems set up done (except accelerometer that we have not yet received). I am now in the process of doing unit test and tuning for the radar.
Upcoming Deliverables
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
- More radar tuning for obstacle detection and obstacle message generation.