In addition to working on the Design Review slides and updating the Gantt chart, I was able to order the flex sensors, so hopefully we can start actually building the glove this upcoming week. Initially I wanted to use Sensor Symbol’s SpectraFlex sensors, but after calculating the cost for 10-12 sensors decided this would put too big of a dent in our budget. As such, we decided to go with Sensor Symbol’s original flex sensors (active sensor length 95mm to span the length of an average-sized finger). The tradeoff demonstrated by this choice is between cost and performance/aesthetics. In addition, I did some research on the word choice we want to demonstrate for our MVP. One of the comments we got from our initial proposal presentation was that the decision to have 26 double-handed words seemed arbitrary. To address this, I found a 2017 paper that identified the top 200 most commonly used words in the ASL vocabulary. They selected 56 ASL words from five word categories (pronoun, noun, verb, adjective, and adverb). 29 words from this subset are double-handed and 27 are one-handed. So, we might take inspiration from this paper and have our MVP vocabulary be based on signed word frequency.
In terms of progress, my progress is on schedule.
In terms of this week’s deliverables, I expect all our parts to arrive shortly, so in preparation for that I want to flesh out a circuit diagram for the pinout of the flex sensors with the computing unit and necessary resistors/op-amps. I want to do some research into which op-amps I should select for the best voltage output from the sensors (the op-amp acts as an impedance buffer). I also want to start thinking about the Arduino code we will use to conglomerate the data from the sensors and send them to the computer, as well as how we will test sensor output, e.g. determine a noise threshold to reject/accept voltage outputs based on how noisy they are.