Abstract
The aim of this project was to produce a system to aid guiding the blind around buildings they are unfamiliar with. This set of pages deals with my involvement with the project
Introduction
During our initial meeting at the start of the project, we discussed a few potential ideas for our project, but quickly settled on some kind of building navigation system. Our original concept considered scenarios such as earthquakes or fires as well as guiding people with disabilities, though after discovering that one of last years groups had already considered the disaster situation, we decided to focus our attention on building a system for helping the blind navigate buildings that are unknown to them.
We then spent about a week discussing this problem and how a system capable of solving it should function, then sketched out a few use cases and a general design for the system utilising UML at Andy's guidance. These designs can be foud in Andy's report, and the list of functional requirements that were also produced can be found in Richard's report. This process helped to ensure that everyone understood the system in the same way, and allowed us to see how it could be broken down into parts that individuals could work on. At this point it was loosely decided that Andy and Gwylim would take care of the GUI interface and the server which tied it to the rest of the system, while Richard would handle the code to support the network of wall nodes needed to provide communications throughout the system, and Tom and myself would concentrate on the hardware required to realise the final device. Both of us are taking an Electronics & Computer Science course, however while Tom has a keen interest in digital programmable embeded systems and has previously worked on the ProSpeckZ-IIk before, my own interests are more towards analog design, which this particular project didn't really have a lot of.
Naturally, this meant that a lot of the work involved in getting sub devices (such as the compass and the text to speech unit) to communicate with the Speck were handled by Tom as he had past experience and knowledge to work from, while I handled building the motors. Given that there wasn't much for me to actually do on the hardware side of things, I focused on trying to handle any jobs that weren't quite being handled by anyone else, so I wrote the initial version of the rangefinding code and partly developed the callback structure which would be required for the final application code. I also handled procuring devices necessary for the completion of the project, such as the SPI Compass from PNI, Batteries and Battery Packs necessary to provide the wallnode devices with a more substantial battery life, and the belt which eventually formed the basis of the finished system. I also produced the presentation given at the demo, and helped test the final system. Further information on my involvement in these particular areas can be found on the pages linked within the menu on the left.