Progress | Week 6

This week, I began prototyping system design with a Sharp IR sensor, along with a garosa haptic motor and an ADC, all in python. The MCU currently in house is a raspberry pi 3b+, which does not have an onboard ADC - necessitating the external ADC for this prototype, however product have been order which should allow for testing a design closer to our end goal soon. Through testing it is determined that there should be no compatibility issue between the selected sensors, motors, and microcontroller. While it should be noted however that documentation on the raspberry pi pico 2 is controversial in determining whether the controller supports python or micropython, there should be no issue transitioning between the two, and there will not be any unforeseen compatibility issues which arise from this.Basic UI/UX Designs to the website were conducted, namely in the Progress Log and Weekly Meetings pages. Note that future weekly progress pages will need to be changed to the new format (found in this week's progress log). Project research and brainstorming has continued for determining project scope and design. Namely, I restructured the proposed design of the product to potentially include 16 haptic motors, rather than 8. The motors are light and small, so the dimensions of the product should prove sufficient to support this, however for early prototyping we may use fewer for testing purposes. The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 has 26 GPIO pins all capable of utilizing pulse width modulation, so including 16 haptic motors should be no issue in that regard. It should be noted however that the Pico 2 has only 3 ADC pins, meaning if we plan to have 8 IR sensors, we will need a sensor -> Multiplexer ADC -> MCU system to accomodate for the higher number of required pins. Research into serial Multiplexer ADCs (MCP3008) has begun.

The current physical prototype can be found in the lab along with the materials and products which have already come in (including garosa motors, a shorter range sharp IR sensor, and head mounting mechanisms)Finally, I made small updates to both the block diagrams and system flowcharts. During this week, I also planned and designed a rough, initial timeline for the proposed project plan. I created both a linear format for this timeline, as well as a Gannt chart for better visualization of resource and time allocation. In this timeline, I included space primarily for project efforts related directly to the creation of the device, rather than research-based or proposal-semester based content. I did however allocate time for creation of the presentation, and practice for it.

I also continued work on prototyping the Sharp IR Sensor, the Haptic Garosa Motor, and the MCU. This week, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 I ordered arrived, and I was able to start designing the new PoC device around it. There seems to be issues bootloading the new MCU, meaning that I have been unable to load any new code onto the device, however this issue is currently being looked into.

Below are images of the simple circuit setup I've started designing, the first iteration of the timeline, as well as the code I have worked on from both last and this week.