Week’s Accomplishments:

Problems:

Network protocols are hard. Took me 48 hours to get the transmitters wired correctly and communicating a vcard bidirectionally successfully. Then I discover that one of the accelerometers appears to be broken. This has delayed the next stage of the protocol development where I need to implement a discovery protocol when receiving a shake event.

Successes:

The transmitters, after all the pain getting them here and setup, do in fact work. The wiring is a bit touchy, but I hope that will be fixed once they are more permanently attached. The other good news is that the $10 accelerometers I got have built in high pass filters for shake detection. And it worked pretty well. Granted, the communication is a fair bit more complicated than a simple analog model, but in return I don’t have to implement a potentially complex filter on the microcontroller.

Schedule:

At this point I’m looking at things to prune. I’ve already tossed the range testing stage for lack of time. I may end up tossing the discovery protocol too, if I can’t get new sensors in fast enough or if proves too complicated in the time I have left.

Next week:

The last and hopefully final shipments are in route from Amazon and Sparkfun. These include the wrist straps (2 models, not sure which is best) and battery connections. Needless to say, these are the critical pieces to finish this project off. They should be in by Thursday so I can assemble everything this weekend and put on the final coding touches. Like it or not, this project is coming down to the wire.