Room Navigator Log

Week of Jan 29

This was the first week after we had gotten our teams. We mainly focused on coming up with our project ideas and deciding the best strategies to go about them. It was project planning more than anything else.

Week of Feb 5

Wednesday Feb 7:
Group met from 2-4 to plan the project. We brainstormed and researched ideas for components of the project. Specifically, we discussed how to locate the exact position of someone in the room, how to instruct the user where to go effectively, and how to go about coding our ideas.
We met with our TA at 5:30 and narrowed down our ideas. Currently, we are thinking we will use FM radio Arduino module to locate the position of the user in the room. We will have separate Arduinos for each FM module. Then there will be another Arduino connected to vibration motors to instruct the user where to go.

Thursday Feb 8:
worked on the project proposal.

Friday Feb 9:
Group met with instructor from 2-2:30. We discussed finding a different way of finding position in a room such as ultrasonic or infared sensors. Our first priority is deciding exactly what we will use to find position in a room. We also need to think about the standard of systems similar to ours for blind or blind-deaf people so we are giving them instructions in a helpful way.

Week of Feb 12

Goals:

• familiarize ourselves with Arduino
• research how to find position in the room using different beacons or sensors
• decide on the materials we need to find location
• order materials

Tuesday Feb 13:
Elizabeth worked on the Arduino and researched using ultrasonic beacons for an hour.
Here is the code and a video of the Arduino demo. When the button is pressed, the LED lights up for 2 seconds.

Wednesday Feb 14:
Met with TA, Nate and discussed using infrared receivers to determine distance instead of FM radio signals or ultrasonic sensors.

Thursday Feb 15:
Elizabeth worked for 2 hours on updating the budget, Gantt chart, and wiki page to reflect our decision to use infrared receivers instead of FM radio modules. Also researched the Arduino code for implementing the IR receiver and getting signal strength readings from it.
Group met for an hour. We worked on the Gantt chart and discussed using infrared receivers more in depth.

Friday Feb 16:
Met with Jim to confirm our materials and budget.
Neal ordered the materials.

Week of Feb 19

Goals:

• learning Arduino
• Working on code for LEDs
• Researching and starting code for the IR receiver

Monday:

• Elizabeth wrote code to have the infrared LEDs blink once per second.

Tuesday:

• Alex watched videos online for an hour to learn more about arduino applications

Wednesday:

• Neal worked on the powerpoint presentation for an hour
• Meeting with Nate

Thursday:

• Elizabeth wrote code to test the vibration motors using the PWM pins, tested the IR sensor, and worked on wiki page and powerpoint presentation for 2 hours. This first video shows the vibrating motor and increasing the intensity of vibration using a PWM pin. The second video shows a blinking LED using delta timing - the same code we will use to blink the IR LEDs.

Sunday:

• Neal worked on learning Arduino and began working on code for IR Sensor. The video below is just to demonstrate that I was able to get the vibrating motor to work. I will upload more next week to demonstrate the IR Sensor working with the vibrating motor.

Week of Feb 26

Goals

• work on IR receiver code
• put LEDs together
• Work on design for LED part of project

Wednesday:

• Alex spent an hour and a half learning more arduino coding as well as how to successfully receive IR receiver readings.

Wednesday Meeting with Nate: 5:30-7

• Debugged some code to figure out the IR sensors. Instead of the ones we ordered, we used an IR photo diode sensor. We are now able to get a reading from the sensor, however, our IR LEDs are not working. We need to do some calculations to figure out how to connect them as they only need 1.5V.
• Talked about the set up for the lights part, from the number of lights to the design we want to use to focus the light

Thursday:

• Neal spent two hours coding and testing two things in arduino. The first was putting the lights in parallel. The second was making sure the vibrating motor responds to changes in infrared. Just to explain the videos a bit. The first one is the lights in parallel. I used LEDs b/c obviously you can't see the IR ones that well but I figure a similar set up will be used to code using LEDs. The second one is the vibrating motor. I used a remote to change the IR and you can hear (idk how well it can be seen) the vibrating motor stop vibrating. It was a little finicky but I did get it to work.

• Elizabeth spent 2 hours coding, testing, and doing resistor calculations to try and get the IR LEDs to work. They are unlike normal LEDs in that they have a maximum voltage of 1.5 volts. One website suggests a 150 ohm resistor which I did not have. The photodiode value did not change however (it stayed at 1023 indicating no IR light). This is something we would like some assistance on. We need to do this in order to start measuring distance.

Friday:

• Met with Jim
• Group worked on making the IR LEDs work for an hour. We tried different resistor values, resistor calculations etc.

Week of March 5

Goals: We want to make sure we can read distance with our sensor before break. In order to do this, we need to get our IR LEDs to work. Once we figure out how to do this, then we can start experimenting with the LEDs and sensor to determine distance.

Wednesday: Meeting with Nate

• We are waiting on how to light up our IR LEDs in order to start measuring distance
• Do some research on how to reflect and direct the LED light
• talked about working on a design for the 3D printed cases

Elizabeth spent an hour doing some research on how best to direct the IR light from the LEDs.
Here is a picture of how to connect the IR sensor/photodiode.