Overview
In Grade 11 I had a shower thought about a system which would inform blind individuals about large incoming obstacles that were too far away to be felt by a cane. When COVID started later that year, I decided I would start engineering this system and would use it as my upcoming Grade 12 capstone project. I worked on it throughout the summer and the following year until my Capstone deadline in December.
I started the project by buying an Arduino and an array of ultrasonic sensors and vibration motors. I set up these components on a series of breadboards and testing rigs to ensure they were outputting accurate measurements and that my code was functioning as expected before mounting them to a shirt. I then 3D designed hot swappable mounts for the ultrasonic sensors which I could sew to the shirt, measuring the amount of FOV overlap between the sensors and ensuring they did not interfere with each other. My initial design for the sensors overlooked that the zipties I would use to secure the sensors blocked the sensor pins so I redesigned it to use 2 zip ties which stay out of the way and which had a smaller mounting plate which could be sewn to the shirt.
After sewing these sensor mounts to the shirt, I modified an existing case design for the arduino to fit on my belt and ran wiring for the sensors down to the arduino. I used the adhesive that came on the vibration motors to connect them to the shirt as it was strong enough to hold them in place without additional sewing or gluing. When I started testing the complete system, I ran into issues in that the arduino was reading the correct values but the motors were not vibrating correctly. After painfully checking the code many times and every single one of the ~150 wires, I realised that one wire had an unstable connection which I replaced. After fixing this issue, the system worked well but still required some tuning in sensor reactiveness and vibration strength in order to be as intuitive as possible. I then did a test demonstration which was recorded and is shown below in which I identify the positions of the walls and obstacles around me as I walk throughout my home.
Gallery
