Test Drive-2: Rigorous Testing

This is the second test drive of viSparsh belt. We prepared an obstacle course in a closed hall and and simulated a special test environment with dummies and different sort of obstacles. The obstacles were of different materials, heights and widths. The test results were quite encouraging.


There has been some significant changes from our last test drive- 
1. We have increased number of vibrators from three to six to give a better indication of obstacle to the user. 
2. An autorun script has been created and deployed which starts the viSparsh belt automatically when we switch it on.  


Here is a video snippet of this test drive-

Autorun

Although we finished the first phase of viSparsh. There were certain fine tunings required to make the belt wearable. The belt stills needed to be started by executing a file on ubuntu-terminal. To resolve that we needed an autorun file which automatically runs at startup and kickstarts the belt. This can be done by creating an initialization daemon. We have created this daemon and now the belt can run on its own. The detailed process is given below- 

STEP1: Create the autorun script

Create a new file 'auto_visparsh' at Desktop with the commands starting the viSparsh belt as content. Copy following command in this file. 

COMMAND:

cd /root/OpenNI/Platform/Linux-x86/Bin/Release
./SimpleRead.net.exe 

STEP2: Copy this autorun file to /etc/init.d 

/etc/init.d contains all scripts which are run on startup and shutdown automatically. The '.d' in 'init.d' represents 'daemon'. Daemon are the processes which are executed in background.

COMMAND:

cd /etc/init.d
cp /home/visparsh/Desktop/auto_visparsh /etc/init.d

STEP3: Choose the run-level

Create a 'soft-link' of the autorun file in one of the run-level directory {rc0.d, rc1.d rc2.d rc3.d rc4.d, rc5.d, rc6.d}. For our purpose choose 'rc2.d'. Don't use 'rc0','rc1' and 'rc6' they contain shutdown scripts. We can also set priority of the process using 'SXX' where XX represents the priority {00<=XX<=99}. The letter 'S' represents 'Start' and can be replaced by 'K' to deactivate a script.   

COMMAND:

cd /etc/rc2.d
ln -s ../init.d/auto_visparsh S99auto_visparsh

STEP4: Restart

Now restart the board. This time belt will start automatically.