Week 7! Time is flying by.

I can’t believe it is already Week 7! This past weekend was the Fourth of July and my Mom came into towIMG_1045n for a visit. We have fantastic food and she got to meet some of my friends. The amazing food in downtown Bloomington also sold her on IU.

This photo was taken in downtown Indianapolis near the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. We went to a Taste of Indy and the food trucks were fantastic. I will miss all of the amazing food in this town when I return to Penn State.

Monday

Today, I spent a few hours working on the 4th to finish our proto-prototype. Ben needed us to finish it before the observation session on Tuesday to have an example of quilting and electronics together; therefore, it had to be done on the holiday! So, on our trip to Indy to take my Mom to the airport and for a few hours when I returned, I sewed all of the borders onto the backing to complete the little placemat-sized quilt.

Tuesday

Today, we began by organizing a plan for this short week, in order to accomplish all of our deliverables. We decided to work on sketching our poster before we left for an observation. We worked out a very rough outline of what it will look like.

At 9 A.M., we left and drove to the Twin Lakes Recreation Center’s weekly lap quilting meeting for seniors living in Bloomington. We arrived and discovered that the women are doing a plethora of different quilting. They were all very nice and had a solid understanding of advanced quilting. Each of them shared a lot of personal quilting experience and the environment seemed to be one of sharing and crafting. I wish we could have taken photos and share more than just general information but it was great experience. I felt as though I learned a lot.

We returned to the Informatics Building and debriefed about the experience. Following that, Sam and I worked on writing about our experience at the group meeting for our paper and then moved on to working on digitizing our poster and formalizing the lightning talk slide show. top left

At night, I worked on analyzing the data that we got from our experience with the accelerometer to find the happy-medium data range for sleeping, at night. Sam and I looked at all of the data and decided the center position was best for the accelerometer. Also we worked on our Lightning Talk. We also developed pseudocode for the Arduino on our quilt to detect sleep and show LED lights for the number of hours. It was a productive day.

Wednesday

Sam and I began the day around 7:30am, trying to get into the habit of working early to get ready for our early meeting with Katie tomorrow. We began by blogging about our experiences yesterday.

At 9am, Ben was gracious enough to meet with us to help us transform our Pseudocode into the code we need in Arduino to have working sensors on our quilt. We quickly re-discussed the honest purpose for our quilt and decided to use it as a resting quilt instead of a quilt to track sleeping. Now, it will track and signal long periods of time without motion. The accelerometer will detect that by noticing crazy hikes in the data that would be a sign of motion.  4 LEDs will be programmed to shine with each LED representing 30 minutes that the individual hasn’t been moving with the quilt on top of them. Whenever they get up and move, the tracking will reset indicating that the quilt user is active in some way and no longer resting.ExemplarQuiltCodewithAccelerometer For now, we are keeping it simple by turning the sleep sensing on and off with the click of the on button on the Lilypad Arduino. In the future, we hope to add a buzzer that will buzz after 2 hours of inactivity. Ben was patient with Sam and I and we finished the code.

We then worked to map out the pathways that the conductive thread will take between the board, the 4 LEDs and the accelerometer to avoid any paths crossing and to put it in the most ideal position for re-coding or recharging access.

We then went to a fantastic seminar covering the graduate school application process, as well as numerous scholarships to study abroad and conduct international research.

Thursday

Thursday was a very busy and productive day full of both success and failure. We began the day quite early with a 7 am meeting with Katie. We received lots of feedback on our Findings and Discussion section that I will change in the next day or so. The morning was full of testing the new programming, iterating, failing, testing again, failing again and then figuring some tidbit out to then have a bit of success. We had lots of problems with our Arduino code and the setup in general. At first, we realized that we were missing a label because the Serial monitor was reading the numbers 16, 17 and 19 which didn’t make any sense. The numbers are typically between 400 and 700.  Then, we asked Ben for helped and he identified the issue that those numbers represented the actual pins numbers corresponding to the coordinates. Next, our LED lights wouldn’t light up in their specific order and wouldn’t turn off by pushing the button. The starting signal worked to denote that power was flowing. After an hour of frustration, Ben looked again and he realized that one connection was poor. Nothing was working and I quickly then found that many wires were crossing on the bottom side of my quilt. Sam and I then needed to test the thing in a “real life” situation of tossing and turning. Once we did do that, it worked to detect changes in motion. Then, we mapped out the paths of conductive thread using paper and a pencil. Soon enough, we realized that it was virtually impossible to not cross and negative lines and use the X,Y, and Z components of the accelerometer. In order to make a firm decision about whether or not X could be removed, we had to do more “real life” testing, analyze the data and look for any reason that we couldn’t remove the X component. Sam and I got worried because the serial monitor was still reading integers for the X value of the accelerometer and it changed, never hit zero and stayed consistent with the other values, even when it wasn’t plugged in. But, an hour later, we realized that the serial monitor continued to display ghost values. Things eventually worked out and we planned the whole thing out for Sam to sew tomorrow.

Friday

I went out of town on Friday and spent all of my travel time writing more for our paper. I added tons to our Findings and Discussion sections to make them more of a complete draft. I also re-read our entire paper and made edits.