Personal Accomplishments:
- Lab Meetings (3 hrs): During the lab meeting time, Jason, Johnny, and I touched base on our current schedule and discussed more about what material the radar cover should use. We felt happy about the adjustment we made last week. See last week’s group report for more details. We met with Prof. Fedder and received feedback about our design review paper.
- Ethics Assignment (4 hrs): I took some time to reflect on the ethics articles that are related to the ethics assignment. I learned the political implications of engineering and analyzed technologies like autonomous aircraft and facial recognition technology.
- Radar software bring-up (5 hrs): I finished the initial radar software bring-up by allowing the radar to read out some basic detection results. Here is some basic output:
There were some issues in establishing the communication between radar and RPi during the process. Initially, the default UART port for RPi did not transmit nor receive data. This was resolved by updating the firmware of the Pi after reading a post in the forum. After the basic UART functionality was checked out, the radar still was not able to communicate. I realized that the default UART for RPi 4 was a mini-UART, which does not support parity bits based on this chart. 
Our radar requires even parity, so the default UART would not work. I reconfigured the hardware setup so that the radar used UART2, which supports parity bits. This resolved the communication issues. In this phase, I let the radar print out a list of detection targets with their distance and velocity. This concluded the radar’s initial software bring-up task for the project.
Progress:
I am back on schedule from last week’s slight delay. The initial software bring-up for the radar was completed early this week, and I am in the process of tuning the radar for our needs.
Next Week:
- More radar tuning for blind-spot detection and collision detection.
- Ethics lecture