Independent Study
My Project!
Police officers in the United States disproportionately pull over, cite, arrest, and even use lethal force against People of Color. Even with the implementation of police body cameras, their effectiveness has proven to be minimal. Our device centers around the most prevalent cause of interactions between police and civilians; a traffic stop. It is a dash mounted integrated system that has three main goals: reduce unnecessary/“targeted” stops, improve interactions between police and civilians during traffic stops, and provide protected, video, motion, and location data about traffic stops that will be uploaded to a private database. The driver will then be given the option to either keep the data private or upload the video data to social media while keeping the other data ,(GPS and accelerometer), private.
InvenTeams_21_Handbook_full (1).pdfThe Invent Team handbook is located to the left and that goes into much greater detail on the expectations of each independent student role including the administrative role.
Requirements for Independent Study Class
Each week I will have to report back to my teacher on all work I have completed for that week. I will also keep a detailed log of all work on this page and this will be used both by me and my teacher to track my progress towards my end goal, in my case that will be completing our invention by the end of the school year in time to travel to MIT and present our invention.
Week 14
This week, I took some time to put together information about two different motherboards that we will possibly use in our final invention. I have information abut each component that is needed for the invention along with where to buy it or at least enough information to find where it can be bought. I focused my information on the Raspberry Pi board because it is the one the team knows the least about because we are quite familiar with an arduino. Part of the reason for me completing this is to convince the team that we should use a Raspberry Pi because of its better processing power and customizability, but it would take more time to learn how to use because we are, like I said, already familiar with an Arduino.
Week 15
This week, I took the time to work with the accelerometer that we were given at the beginning of the school year by my engineering teacher. We will be using a similar sencor in our invent team project, so even if we do not use this exact module or even board, i now have a basic understanding of what it can do, and what to expect when it comes to getting it working. To help me wire and code the GY-521 module, I used this website. The video shows the device working along with come commentary about it.
Accelerometer Test VideoWeek 16
This week, I helped collect information for our teams polo shirts that we will be ordering. I created a document in the teams shared folder with the information I gathered as it came in from the group me chat where I initially asked for this information from my teammates.
Week 17
This weeks progress was a little delayed, but there was good reason for that. I started the week by acquiring a raspberry pi from my teacher to try to get ahead of the team, and I followed the steps, but realized at the end that I had made a mistake, and I would actually need to re download the software onto the raspberry pi's sd card. Once I plugged in the sd card onto my computer and formatted the disk like raspberry pi's website said, the drive had been corrupted and no longer registered any of its storage. After realizing this, I did some research and found our that the raspberry pi only accepts certain SD cards, so I had to go buy a brand new, name brand SD card to use in the Pi. After more research on finding out how exactly to get the software onto the SD card, I was finally able to get the Pi working again. Now if any of my teammates have this problem, I will be able to easily walk them through the process without them making the same mistakes.
IMG_6656.MOV
Week 18
This week, I wanted to move away from the technical side of things and look ahead. I've had some idea of what I wanted this device to look like but was never really able to visualize it. I measured most of the components as well as the dimensions of a rear view mirror, and made a quick mock up in tinkercad. This is not meant to be in any capacity a accurate representation of the final product, I just wanted to start visualizing how the end product may look by taking some measurements and representing them inside a 3D space together.
Semester 2
Semester 1 Reflection, and getting started again
Throughout the last semester I was always looking for something to do next, almost struggling, so this semester, I want to be better about laying out my calendar. After looking back at the feedback I received from my classmates last semester, there were two things that were recommended to me. One was re working the actual description of the project and making it simpler, and another was to take some type of class to help me make the teams ideas into reality.
This semester, we have been tasked with having some type of outreach to the public. I feel posting short update videos onto a youtube channel for out team would be a great way to do this, or posting the videos onto the teams instagram and twitter.
IMG_6896.MOVWeek 2
Over this past week I have made some great progress. The hardwear team has been working towards transfering data and over our holiday break we were tasked with that task. My other teammates worked on transferring data over bluetooth and I worked on transferring data over the internet. I was successful in my task but my team members were not able to get the bluetooth working, so this week I tried to help the rest of my teammates out by getting the bluetooth working and I was successful! I was able to complete the task and help my teammates get started. As of now I am ahead of my team in the data transfer department and have continued moving forward.
Week 3
This week my focus was on continuing my progress with transfering data with python using bluetooth, but after almost the whole week of working on it without much success, I decided it was time to ask for help from an outside source our teacher provided. I also have completed the first of my mini update videos that will be posted onto our teams youtube channel.
Week 4
All I did this week was continuing to work towards my goal of bluetooth transmitting with python as well as getting my team mates caught up on bluetooth.
Week 5
As the Mid Grant Tech Review is approaching (Feb. 22), it is time to start preparing our presentation. MIT Lemelson has provided each team with a slide template along with a checklist on each slide of what is expected information. Using both the template and the checklist, I created a separate doc to contain the rough draft of each slide. These slides include Invention Statement, Background Research, Technical Invention, and Next Steps.
Week 6
This week was a continuation of last week so I continued working on the slides for the Mid Grant Tech Review. This included working on the next steps slide as well as making revisions to the previous slides too.
Week 7- Go Fund Me
Part of my tasks for this week were to determine how we could go about individually refunding donors on our go fund me seeing as we no longer require travel funds because of eureka fest being held as a virtual event this year. we would like to give our donors the option to request a refund or allow us to utilize the funds in another way, so my job is to find out how we can make that happen. on Go Fund Me's support page they say the following, "If you do not meet the above criteria to fully refund your fundraiser yourself, you have trouble with the above steps, or you wish to refund only certain donors, please click here to submit your refund request. "
Week 7- Raspberry Pi Sense Hat
The sense hat is what will be used to run the AI portion of the device as well as where the camera will attach, but for our final device, we will need access to the pins where the hat attaches, so we must find a way to run both at the same time.
To get both running together, it will most likely require soldering. This website, https://pinout.xyz/pinout/aiy_vision_bonnet shows what pins the hat uses, and if we look at this, we can tell where we could solder to on top of the hat.
Week 9- Feedback
The majority of the feedback I received during this round of presentations was to create a more simple description of the device, and another assignment I completed earlier this week should help me solve this problem. I was tasked with creating a new invention statement and it should be a perfect simple description for the device. This is the link to the invention statement, I will also copy and paste it to the top of this page.
Week 10- Raspberry Pi Speaker
This week I started the process of adding a speaker, or more specifically a audio jack, to the raspberry pi zero since it does not come with one pre installed on the device. This will consist of making a separate circuit board for the pi. This website is just the written instructions from the video, but there is a circuit diagram on it, so even though I don't currently have all the parts, I made the circuit (pictures below). The part I need has been ordered.
Week 11
*See slide 16&17 for information
For this weeks task, until I receive the rest of the parts for the speaker, I decided to continue my work on the GPS module. I found a website that gave step by step instructions to the process of setting up the GPS, but have been running into one problem after another. I was able to get the GPS to display some data, but was not able to get it working in the more organized layout.
IMG_7384.MOV
Week 12 & 13
The part I need for the audio output of the raspberry pi finally arrived. I hooked up the audio port to my circuit I made a few weeks ago and continued onto the software portion of this process. I completed all the hardware during week 12 and continued onto working with the software over this week (week 13). I went back to the video I found walking through this process and made it all the way to the last step before I ran into a problem. In the Raspi-config folder, I couldn't select the option to have come out of a headphone jack, the only option was for it come out the HDMI port. Just to test if it worked I pugged some headphones into my monitor and audio did come through. Here is a link to a solution.
Week 15
As we are getting close to the end of the school year, all of the focus needs to be put onto the functionality of the main components on the device, and for the hardware team that includes integrating all of the devices together. I have been having problems with my pi so i have been process of moving all of my data onto a new SD card. I was just able to get files to upload to AWS off the new SD card and am well on my way to being caught up.
New SD Card
The new card has been successfully uploading to AWS.
Old SD Card
The old SD card has been giving this error even after re downloading software such as boto3 and even changing the AWS bucket it uploads to.
Week 16&17
Last week the hardware team met in the building to work on integration, and with that time we were able to get all the components wired together (Sense Hat, Camera, GPS, and a button). You can see them all wired in the picture to the right. Now I am working on getting the devices to actually work on the same raspberry pi. The camera is working perfectly fine, but I am having trouble getting the sense hat data to save to a file and upload to AWS.I can't start working on the GPS yet because the original code has not been completed yet by the team member who is in charge of it.
Week 18
This week I got together with my fellow invent team member, Jason to try to tackle a problem that our team has had for the entire duration of the project, the GPS module. We worked for about 2-3 hours trying to get both of the modules I had working, with very little success. We were able to wire them both up, but there is just not enough code already out there to support what we are trying to do. One of the modules could only run in Arduino so we tried downloading Arduino onto the Pi just to see if we could get it to function but were unsuccessful. There was more we tried, (see links for in depth of what all we tried), but we did find one thing that might be our best option. We found another GPS module that is better supported by the python community that should have a lot more pre written code that we can take from to get the device functioning (link on slides). Jason has ordered it and should be able to start working with it this weekend.