5/25/01
Earlier this week we gave our final in-class presentation on the final design of the Freshman's Friend. We also worked on finishing the software for the iPaq.

Today we took the Freshman's Friend out for its alpha test. Everything worked well, but two things will need to be fixed. The GPS coordinates need to calibrated since we were about 100 feet away from where the iPaq thought we were. This should be very easy to fix. Also, there appears to be something wrong with the microcontrollers not sending updated GPS data. Other than that, everything works very well!

5/15/01
Today we met with Group E to resolve any questions we had with their final design report. We also made our slides and prepared for for tomorrow's presentation.

We mainly completed the hardware side of the Freshman's Friend. The microcontrollers now give the iPaq proper location information from the GPS as well as the heading from the compass, with all of the nonessential data removed. Unfortunately, our compass does not behave to specifications. Sometimes we may have 3 pins high at once. We tried using a different compass of the same make and model to determine if the compass was broken. It is our belief that testing the compass in the lab, where there is lots of metal, could be affecting our compass.

We hope to get the voltage regulator this week so we can take it outside, to see if we get proper data from the GPS receiver and compass.

Another problem we have come into is that the microcontrollers lock up on us when we move the breadboard. We will have to ask Chris what he thinks may be causing it, and then try to fix the problem. There is a chance that something is shorting, but we can not locate it.

5/9/01
Today we were able to successfully get the I2C connection working. Initially, we were using Tiny OS on each of the microcontrollers for the I2C communication. However, we realized that the code can be simplified if we wrote it as stand alone code without the operating system. After doing so, the I2C bus began working immediately. We now have our entire communication backbone in place and can begin developing the protocols for the data transfers to be run on top of this.

We have begun the testing of the digital compass and have found that it does not work as expected. We believe that it is a hardware problem so we either need to get a new compass or choose a new part to use. We will have to discuss this issue with Chris Morgan on Thursday.

5/4/01
We have made quite a bit of progress over the past week with the project. Firstly, we successfully configured and tested the GPS receiver via the serial port interface. We will be running the GPS receiver serial transfer at 9600 bps. We soldered up the serial connector to our cable for ease of testing.

We have also gotten the serial data transfer working successfully on both the iPaq and the microcontrollers. On the microcontrollers, the data is passed out the RS-232 port and through the DS275 level converter. We tested it via the serial port in HyperTerminal.

We are connecting the two microcontrollers together via an I2C bus. This is currently connected on our circuit board, but the software is not working correctly as of right now. We chose to use Tiny OS for the operating system on the microcontrollers to ease the implementation of the serial and I2C communications. We have the majority of the code written for the I2C communication, but have not tested it thoroughly enough to figure out what is wrong. That will be our goal for this weekend. We would like to get the I2C communications fully functioning. We will test this by connecting the GPS receiver to one of the microcontrollers, buffering the serial data, passing the data over the I2C bus to the second microcontroller and then passing the data from the second microcontroller to HyperTerminal on the PC via the serial port.

Once we have this solid communications infrastructure in place, we will be ready to start processing the GPS and compass inputs to the microcontrollers and then pass the data from the microcontroller to the iPaq. We will have to design a communications protocol for transfer of data between the microcontroller and the iPaq. This should be a fairly simple protocol to design considering the communication is strictly one way from the microcontroller to the iPaq

As for the graphical interface on the iPaq, we remain in the process of getting image manipulation working on the iPaq. We are currently having some problems with the development environment in the lab, so we need to get those ironed out before we can make any more headway on the user interface design. We have been working on this every day, and we expect to get it up and running fairly soon.

4/27/01
We presented our design to class on Tuesday. We also edited our preliminary design report. After review of our design critique, we have decided to phase out the infrared portion of our design. Instead we will be using two microcontrollers. One will parse the GPS signal, the other will be responsible for sending packets of information for both the GPS and the digital compass. Our next goal is to review Group E's design. Also, we will design and implement our new packet format for the microcontrollers. We will be updating our design report to reflect these changes.

4/20/01
We finished and electronically submitted our preliminary design report on Thursday. We spent almost the entire week working on the design report. We have now received the GPS receiver and we should have almost all of the parts we need. We still need to get a voltage level converter to convert the outputs of the microncontroller into RS-232 voltage levels. Our next task will be getting the serial and infrared communication on the iPaq working successfully. Once this has been done, we will be able to test other parts of the Freshman's Friend more easily.

4/16/01
We are currently tweaking the design of our software as needed to be able to implement in the windows CE environment. The GPS chip was ordered today and should be here shortly. We are also hammering out how we are sending the ir data. It seems like two protocols will be need to send the data from the microcontroller to the iPaq.. I plan on playing with the imaging options available to us in CE tomorrow to hammer out the final design for the route mapping image implementation...ACP