This past week, I helped in finalizing the parts list we would request for purchase and for reservation from existing inventory. I spoke with Professor Mukherjee and our team’s TA, Tjun Jet, about some of the components and their purposes. I also worked on the slide deck for the upcoming design presentation and covered a few solutions regarding the interconnectivity of our components–I began researching how to interface with the accelerometers using the ESP32 MCUs as well as the bluetooth stack we’ll be using to relay data back to the host device. I also helped establish our fallback plans in case any given module from our block diagram does not work as expected. Overall, the team is currently aligned with the schedule we laid out in our Gantt chart, but there is still a considerable amount of research needed before I can confidently outline our technical design to the class. This upcoming week, I plan to do the following in preparation for the design submission:
- Look into our options for BLE abstraction libraries to easily communicate with the microcontroller. My hope is that Python will have an existing API available for the ESP32, but if not, I am prepared to read the documentation for our device’s Bluetooth module and initialize the advertising, connection, and packet transactions manually.
- Similarly, I need to find a way to accept accelerometer data through the MCU. I looked at a few datasheets for the ESP, and it doesn’t use the Cortex M-series microprocessors I’m most familiar with, so I’m not sure if I’ll have to manually write a device driver for the I2C peripheral to communicate with the MPU-6050. Again, hopefully Python has some level of abstraction available for us to use.
- Belle will be mostly working on the repository code for the OpenCV, but I plan to also help with the CV code so that I can get a full understanding of our algorithm’s capabilities before we actually enter testing. It will also help me familiarize myself with the repo we’ll be working in, where we plan to put together Ben’s front and backend implementations, the CV code, and the Bluetooth interface for collecting accelerometer data.
- Prepare slides and practice verbal delivery. Once all of the above details are established, I can describe our technical strategies in greater detail and identify appropriate visuals to include in order to communicate our project vision clearly.