Elliot’s Status Report for 9/28

This week, I was tasked with establishing a basis for communicating with the ESP32 boards and their corresponding MPU-6050 accelerometers. I spent some time looking into the BLE stack to determine the complexity needed for our GATT services and characteristics–the available options were the native ESP IoT Dev Framework, the Arduino IDE, and a MicroPython-based firmware. I concluded that while the ESP-IDF would give us the most control over the pipeline we implement, since our main purpose is to simply transmit the accelerometer data and its timestamp, the service complexity does not call for any fine tuning. Between the Arduino framework and MicroPython, it would be be best to use a compiled language rather than an interpreted one for the purpose of lower latency. Therefore, I started developing some of the C++ code we’ll eventually be flashing to our microcontrollers; to test functionality, I worked on an ESP simulator on Wokwi to set up a bluetooth connection and send accelerometer data to notified clients. Some libraries necessary for the arduino framework include Wire.h for I2C, BLEUtils for initializing the advertising and notifications, and the MPU6050 device driver.

I also practiced my presentation approach for Monday, where I’ll be talking about how our bluetooth, computer vision, and web server modules interact. I emphasized time spent on identifying why we chose the components we chose, as well as developing concrete requirements to link back to our product use case requirements.

For next week, my plan is to:

  1. Hopefully receive our hardware and begin testing the accelerometer thresholds. I’ll set up communication over bluetooth to relay data, and based on our drum hits, we’ll then look at what signal spikes would indicate an adequate hit.
  2. Test bluetooth latency and packet loss. Once we have the ESP32’s wired up, I can insert packet misses to determine adequate rates, as well as measure the latency of our transmissions with timestamps. This is especially important to us, given the fact that we’ll be using two transmission devices in a low latency environment.

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