A Touch of Light

A step towards enlightenment for those living in the world of darkness.

A Young India Fellowship Initiative in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania


      





Thursday, October 13, 2011

The Road Ahead

Some of the other things that we also have started working on are follows:
- We are exploring the options for connecting Internet to the BeagleBoard. Since it doesn't have an inbuilt WiFi, we have decided to go with LAN connection at present. However, since router is placed at some distance, we have to make 20m length cable for our usage.
- For a day or two, we are testing various OS platforms to search the best option suiting our requirements. We have already successfully tested on Angstrom which worked perfectly fine. Our next targets are of Ubuntu Maverick and Android which we hopefully aim to finish soon.
- We have started exploring Kinect to test its various parts. We even did Kinect tear-down in order to gain better understanding of the product.

Crossing Barriers

As was the case with the non-availability of PandaBoard so was with mbed. We were in a crisis situation as one of the main components (mbed) was again out of stock. However, we didn't lose hope and started figuring out other possibilities of getting a mbed to work on. While the search was still on, our teammate Tushar gave us a surprise that we had actually won a free mbed (form was secretly filled by him). We took a sigh of relief as we had crossed another barrier and saved some money :-) . As a back up we had earlier thought of buying 2 mbeds. Luckily we were fortunate enough and after few days mbed was again in stock. Since one of the required two mbeds was already won (:-) ), we thought of placing the order for the 2nd one for our safety.

After we received the mbed yesterday, one of our tasks was to get accustomed to the product as we all three were new to it. We successfully implemented some serial transmission codes through the mbed online compiler.

Slight modification in components

As mentioned in our previous blog, we had initially planned of buying PandaBoard considering the project's future advancements to make use of WiFi/Bluetooth and other upgraded hardware configuration requirements However, things never work as planned :-( and so was the case with us. There was no PandaBoard availability in India before 15th Nov. '11. Our time was passing by swiftly and surely we could not afford to wait so long. In order to keep our deadlines we had to resort to buying 1 BeagleBoard instantly for the initial work while waiting for the PandaBoard's availibility.

Requirement to change the Monitor

We had initially bought Benq 18.5" TFT (LED) Monitor which had only VGA port. However, when Beagleboard arrived we figured out that it would not be a feasible idea to convert HDMI to VGA (Beagleboard-xm had HDMI connectivity while our Benq monitor supported VGA). Fortunately, the vendor agreed to replace the Benq Monitor with Samsung LCD monitor which supported both DVI-D and VGA. In order to use BeagleBoard with this new monitor we simply had to use a HDMI-DVI-D converter. We even checked XBOX360 connectivity with the Monitor and it worked perfectly fine. Thus, finally we found the appropriate monitor for the project.

Parts List

Name of the main components required in the initial phase:
1. Microsoft X-Box 360 4 GB Kinect Bundle
2. PandaBoard
3. mbed - LPC1768 Development Board
4. Vibration Motors (ROB-08449)
5. Logic Level Converter (BOB-08745)

Get Set Go.....

After few weeks of hustle bustle, we were finally able to kick start our project formally on 10th October 2011 when we also began with our 4th term of the program. After the first skype session with our mentor some of our main priorities were figured out to be as follows:

- The first target was to get budget sanction for our project which took about 10 days of time as this was the first time an ELM collaboration was happening between UPenn and YIF. Our budget was finally sanctioned on 23rd Sept. 2011.

- Our second target was to set up a lab at YIF. Since YIFP is in the first year of it's launch, we had space constraint issue. After pondering over various possibilities instead of lingering on, we finally thought to make temporary arrangements for the lab in one of our teammates' hostel room.

- On a parallel track we prepared the part list, did some market survey, figured out the best buy prices and ordered them. As almost all the parts were needed to be imported (required shipping), it again took some of our time in starting the project. Since in between the festive season also began and there was holiday between 28th September- 9th October '11, a further delay happened in obtaining the components. Overall this part also took around 10 days.

- Till the time these components were arriving we went to the local market to buy the miscellaneous items like solder iron, wire, extension board, LAN cable etc required to set up our lab.

- Initially as per our market survey we had decided on buying an ASUS laptop so as to best suit our requirements. However since we had a Samsung laptop (being given to each of the fellows by YIF), for starting purposes we thought of buying Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse separately instead of a new Laptop( with Graphics Card option etc) which costed us less.




Thursday, October 13, 2011

The Road Ahead

Some of the other things that we also have started working on are follows:
- We are exploring the options for connecting Internet to the BeagleBoard. Since it doesn't have an inbuilt WiFi, we have decided to go with LAN connection at present. However, since router is placed at some distance, we have to make 20m length cable for our usage.
- For a day or two, we are testing various OS platforms to search the best option suiting our requirements. We have already successfully tested on Angstrom which worked perfectly fine. Our next targets are of Ubuntu Maverick and Android which we hopefully aim to finish soon.
- We have started exploring Kinect to test its various parts. We even did Kinect tear-down in order to gain better understanding of the product.

Crossing Barriers

As was the case with the non-availability of PandaBoard so was with mbed. We were in a crisis situation as one of the main components (mbed) was again out of stock. However, we didn't lose hope and started figuring out other possibilities of getting a mbed to work on. While the search was still on, our teammate Tushar gave us a surprise that we had actually won a free mbed (form was secretly filled by him). We took a sigh of relief as we had crossed another barrier and saved some money :-) . As a back up we had earlier thought of buying 2 mbeds. Luckily we were fortunate enough and after few days mbed was again in stock. Since one of the required two mbeds was already won (:-) ), we thought of placing the order for the 2nd one for our safety.

After we received the mbed yesterday, one of our tasks was to get accustomed to the product as we all three were new to it. We successfully implemented some serial transmission codes through the mbed online compiler.

Slight modification in components

As mentioned in our previous blog, we had initially planned of buying PandaBoard considering the project's future advancements to make use of WiFi/Bluetooth and other upgraded hardware configuration requirements However, things never work as planned :-( and so was the case with us. There was no PandaBoard availability in India before 15th Nov. '11. Our time was passing by swiftly and surely we could not afford to wait so long. In order to keep our deadlines we had to resort to buying 1 BeagleBoard instantly for the initial work while waiting for the PandaBoard's availibility.

Requirement to change the Monitor

We had initially bought Benq 18.5" TFT (LED) Monitor which had only VGA port. However, when Beagleboard arrived we figured out that it would not be a feasible idea to convert HDMI to VGA (Beagleboard-xm had HDMI connectivity while our Benq monitor supported VGA). Fortunately, the vendor agreed to replace the Benq Monitor with Samsung LCD monitor which supported both DVI-D and VGA. In order to use BeagleBoard with this new monitor we simply had to use a HDMI-DVI-D converter. We even checked XBOX360 connectivity with the Monitor and it worked perfectly fine. Thus, finally we found the appropriate monitor for the project.

Parts List

Name of the main components required in the initial phase:
1. Microsoft X-Box 360 4 GB Kinect Bundle
2. PandaBoard
3. mbed - LPC1768 Development Board
4. Vibration Motors (ROB-08449)
5. Logic Level Converter (BOB-08745)

Get Set Go.....

After few weeks of hustle bustle, we were finally able to kick start our project formally on 10th October 2011 when we also began with our 4th term of the program. After the first skype session with our mentor some of our main priorities were figured out to be as follows:

- The first target was to get budget sanction for our project which took about 10 days of time as this was the first time an ELM collaboration was happening between UPenn and YIF. Our budget was finally sanctioned on 23rd Sept. 2011.

- Our second target was to set up a lab at YIF. Since YIFP is in the first year of it's launch, we had space constraint issue. After pondering over various possibilities instead of lingering on, we finally thought to make temporary arrangements for the lab in one of our teammates' hostel room.

- On a parallel track we prepared the part list, did some market survey, figured out the best buy prices and ordered them. As almost all the parts were needed to be imported (required shipping), it again took some of our time in starting the project. Since in between the festive season also began and there was holiday between 28th September- 9th October '11, a further delay happened in obtaining the components. Overall this part also took around 10 days.

- Till the time these components were arriving we went to the local market to buy the miscellaneous items like solder iron, wire, extension board, LAN cable etc required to set up our lab.

- Initially as per our market survey we had decided on buying an ASUS laptop so as to best suit our requirements. However since we had a Samsung laptop (being given to each of the fellows by YIF), for starting purposes we thought of buying Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse separately instead of a new Laptop( with Graphics Card option etc) which costed us less.