This week, I started by deciding if the speaker was a feasible endeavor for our team. Ricky mentioned a library called Talkie that does text to speech on an Arduino. I thought about how we can use that library on the glove and output speech through a speaker after sending that audio data through an amplifier circuit that I built. Unforuntately, when trying to run the test script I wrote, I found that Talkie does not support the BLE board we have. I assumed since the BLE board has the same architecture as the other boards Talkie does support, it would be worth testing it out, but the source code cases on the board in use and BLE was not on that list. Instead of modifying the source code for the library, we decided that for MVP, it was the best use of our time to keep the speech output coming from the computer.
My next task for this week was figuring out how to power the board. The LiPo 3.7V batteries are the ideal size for our portable product, but the BLE board takes in 4.5V-21V into Vin. I thought about if a larger bulkier battery could work but could not find a battery that was both cheap and was lightweight enought to be mounted on a wearable device. I decided to look into a step up dc dc converter instead. The capacitors on them are a bit bulky, but they will do the trick and the MT3608 chip can output a voltage in the range we need. I found the schematic for this board, added it to our custom pcb, ordered the part, and plan to test the wireless powering of our board on Monday.