Batteries and Android

In the past two weeks, I’ve been researching the battery charger for our lithium ion battery as well as starting to learn some Android development. For the battery, we learned that our charger only has the basic function of charging the battery. Sparkfun does provide other boards that provide more options, however the boards seem a bit too big for our project. At first, I researched boards that would be able to tell us the amount of charge in the battery, however, this isn’t a big concern since we can just use another device to check the juice. One of our main concerns is whether or not we’ll have the ability to charge the battery while the device is being used. Right now, it doesn’t seem like it would work very well. We’re going to try hooking up the charger to another board to allow it to charge right. There are two holes for +/- charges next to the connector that we can probably work with to accomplish this.

This week, I’ve started to learn how to use Android a bit. I’ve never done any Android development before, so this is completely new. I have the development tools set up on my laptop and I’ve been starting on some tutorials. The Android website has some tutorials such as the basic Hello, World app as well as a notepad app. I’m trying to do the notepad app right now. Some other members have also sent me links for an introduction to Android that I can go through.

Besides this, we’ve also changed the layout again greatly. For one, we’ve decided to have two separate parts to the device that will connect. This is because the braces we’ve been looking at are designed to provide more stability and limit movement, however this is the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish. We want patients to be able to move as freely as they can. We’ve also ordered new sensors that we want to try out. The flex sensors haven’t been able to give us a good, stable reading. We’re looking at new sensors now that can calculate the rotation of the knee.

-Alice