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Logan’s Status Report 5/8

This week we began working on our poster and some last-minute tweaks to finalize our system. I personally worked on designing an enclosure for the Raspberry Pi/IR component of the system. The enclosure will be 3D-printed and allow us to mount the camera in a more polished and presentable way.

We are on schedule, except the 3D printed enclosure for the Raspberry Pi/IR sensor will not be complete in time for taking photos tomorrow, but should be ready for the demo session.

This coming week we will present our working system via the final demo and continue to add finishing touches, while also working on the final report.

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Logan’s Status Report 5/1

I ended up working on the connector scripts for communicating haptic feedback signals out of the Unity game, over the wire to the Pi, and via Bluetooth to the glove. The Unity game communicates over a socket to the python script that handles serial communication between the laptop and the Pi. Because there is asynchronous reading and writing, I had to incorporate multithreading and synchronization for the serial port. I also worked on our slides and testing for our system.

We are on schedule.

This coming week we will present our working system.

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Logan’s Status Report 4/10

Our team has been meeting in Hammerschlag very frequently. Previously we were working synchronously on the same aspects of the system together. To improve efficiency we decided to work in parallel on separate aspects of the system, which has worked well. I focused on the motion tracking all week, and was able to write a script that will be sufficient for our demo next week. I also worked on the serial communication between the Raspberry Pi and the PC. I ran into a number of problems in doing so, but later realized the voltage of my laptop’s USB port was greater than what the Raspberry Pi expected, and after using a different computer it worked correctly.

We caught up significantly this week, and are roughly back on schedule. The remainder of the semester will be dedicated to further improving our MVP system.

Coming up this next week we are meeting again before the demo to finalize our system and test it. We do not plan to meet during Carnival.

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Logan’s Status Report 4/3

Our team continued to meet in Hammerschlag this week to work on our project. We spent more time working on the LED tracking, and on Saturday decided that we would split up the remainder of the project before the demo into individual projects that we will be working on in parallel, and still meeting up on campus to put things together. The LED tracking is still not perfect, and will still need some significant improvements before it can reliably be used in the glove. This will be my main focus for the first part of next week. We completed the vast majority of the soldering, which ended up taking a significant amount of time.

We are running very close to the schedule, and may need to make adjustments depending upon how next week goes.

I will mainly be focusing on the LED tracking component of the project, and working to improve the accuracy/speed before our next team meeting on Monday in Hammerschlag. Following that, I will be helping further assemble the glove and working on the Bluetooth connection.

 

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Logan’s Status Report 3/27

This past week our team met twice in Hammerschlag to work on our design. Our goal for this week was to finalize our positional tracking design and test it. We have had decent success with tracking the infrared LED via the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera. However, there is still an issue of background light being detected as false positives. Our code greyscales the image from the NoIR camera and masks it to filter anything below a certain threshold, because the infrared light is essentially a perfect white as RGB. One unexpected issue is that the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera does allow infrared light, however it converts it to RGB and does not expose an infrared channel. Beyond working on the project, I also started the ethics assignment and read through the first of the assigned articles. I thought the examples provided were very interesting and expanded my perspective on the political aspects of technology.

We are on schedule and have made no changes to it as of now.

Next week we will need to improve our positional tracking and specifically solve the issue of false positives in the form of background light. This is partially due to the NoIR camera not providing an infrared channel. If it exposed an infrared channel we would likely have better success tracking the infrared LED. Solving this challenge will be our next goal, and we have a few ideas to accomplish it. One solution is that the LED can blink at a high frequency, and in this way we can differentiate it from background light. There are also background subtraction filters available in OpenCV, which may help alleviate the background light issue.

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Logan’s Status Report 3/13/2021

This week we had our Design presentation which Arthur gave. We received a lot of useful feedback. One of the main takeaways is that we really need to put more thought into the IMU design decision, and how we will deal with drift. Our schedule needs to be adjusted to test and design the position tracking system first before any other tasks are completed for the glove. I completed another one of the game assets this week (the bomb). I still want to work more on the texture but that will be deprioritized until later.

We are on schedule, but need to prioritize testing the IMU position tracking.

Next week I will be working on the design report and working on nailing down our positional tracking design.

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Logan’s Status Report 3/6/2020

This week I put a hold on going further with the Unity and asset development as a result of our discussion on Monday to focus more on the physical glove itself, and treat the game as a very minimal demo to start. So instead of frontloading our time with the game assets and development, we met multiple times this week to nail down our exact goals for the glove, and hone in our design. One pivot that we made this week was to purchase IMUs which we plan to test as an alternative to the camera-based motion tracking. I helped work on the design presentation, including the block diagram and metrics/validation sections.
We are on schedule, although our focus has shifted somewhat.
Next week we plan to continue current work, where the development for the game will consist of only what we need to get the bare bones proof of concept working first. Depending on when parts arrive, I expect to spend time helping Arthur configure the IMU components to test extracting motion coordinates.
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Logan’s Status Report for Feb 27

I prepared for and presented our project proposal. Feedback was overall both constructive and positive. We need to consider quantifying our requirements and testing strategy going forward. As per our schedule I have installed and been working in blender to develop the 3D models for the game. This has taken a good amount of learning, as expected.

We are on schedule, however we need to order our parts as soon as possible.

For the next week I intend to continue to make progress on the 3D models I am responsible for as well as integration within Unity. I will likely be working with Ishaan to do this next week.

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Logan’s Status Report for Feb 20

This week I accomplished my main deliverable of creating my assigned slides for the Proposal Presentation. Our team met multiple times throughout the week during and outside of class to respond to instructor feedback and refine our proposal and project idea. We met on Saturday to set up this WordPress site and finish our slides, and I volunteered to present on Monday.

We are on schedule.

In the coming week I plan to present for our team’s Proposal Presentation. As planned, I intend to help procure the parts we need for the physical glove this coming week, as well as begin designs on the 3D elements of our game. I expect next week to include significant time spent becoming acquainted with Unity as well.