Work Done

This week I started looking at ways to implement the ultrasonic sensor and the microphone into Spud.

I started watching videos of how to use ultrasonic sensors and tried it myself. It was quite straightforward and easy to work on. For voice recognition, I found a way of using the microphone on the laptop instead of the Arduino microphone module using C# (they used the Visual Studio IDE) from this website tutorial here. Hopefully it would not be that hard to implement these in Spud as it might be tricky to do this with two different modes, the alert and friendly mode, and having to send information from the visual studio IDE to Arduino.

I also did user testing to determine how far the distance of the person walking towards the user should be before Spud reacts. Results:

• >1.3m away from user = normal
• <1.3m away from user = Spud turns angry as a warning
• <0.8m away from user = Spud shakes its head/ waves to the person.

Work to be done

For Spud, I have to start implementing the ultrasonic sensor and the voice recognition as fast as possible. At the same time, I also have to work on my website as that might take a long time to make it nice and presentable. I'll first make the form of the website and set up the CSS and JavaScript code. Then, I will write down content about my work with Spud and decide how to display it without making it just seem like a document.