Better Haptic Feedback using new vibration motors

In our first prototype of the belt, we were using ROB 08449 buzzers (left side of the image) to give haptic feedback to the visually impaired people.

The vibrations produced by them were perpendicular to axes of the belt and thus got significantly reduced as we taped them inside the belt. Therefore, we needed more powerful vibration motors for our purpose.

We have replaced the current motors with Pico Vibe 9mm Vibration Motor- 25mm type (RHS of the image) as it provides vibrations both in X and Y planes.

As could be seen in the pic, they are slightly bigger in size (25mm length and 8.8mm diameter) compared to 3.4 mm length of ROB-08449 motors. However, both operate at 3V and Pico Vibe produces 13,500rpm speed compared to 12000rpm of ROB-08449 buzzers. This is a significant improvement as our output depends on the efficiency of these vibrations. Further, instead of earlier 6 motors, we now have to use only 3 motors in the belt ( one for each zone- left, centre and right).

Getting ready to release the 1st version

Huhuuu! After facing lots of troubles at every step, we were finally able to get the project working by seamlessly integrating all the components. The video above shows as to how Kinect is able to detect an object (human in our case) and give an alarm depending on the distance between the human and Kinect. In our case, we have used three vibration motors for producing these alert signals. Each motor is used to send an alert for obstacle in one particular direction namely, left, right or middle. These three motors would help a visually impaired person in identifying the direction in which the obstacle is present. We hope to transfer this functionality on the belt in a day or two.This would mark the end of first phase of our project where we were supposed to make a working prototype of the viSparsh Belt.

Serially the way out

In order to transmit the data from BeagleBoard to Mbed microcontroller to actuate the vibration motors we need to transmit data serially. Hence we successfully tested serially full duplex communication from Linux (x86 processor) to other PC terminal. Next target is running the Kinect and OpenNi on Ubuntu (we have already succesfully checked the same on Windows7).