April 28th

On the past weeks I've been working on the Android App. I wanted to make an App that could communicate via Bluetooth with my setup. To create this application I've been using the Eclipse IDE with built-in Android Developer Tools (ADT). So far I've an application that have the calibration interface and the settings menu to setup the bluetooth. I've never had programmed in Java therefore is being a rather interesting learning process!

Last week, on Friday, my sensors have finally arrived! I got 4 Force Load Cells, 6 Force sensitive Resistors and 4 IR sensors, and their signal conditioning and acquisition board. 

Figure 1 - Phidgets InterfaceKit with 3 connected sensors and a LED for testing.

Figure 2 - Force Load Cell mounted in the pedal case.

Figure 3 - FSR with the signal conditioning board.

Figure 4 - IR Sharp sensor with the conditioning board.

The acquisition board is the InterfaceKit 8/8/8 from Phidgets, and to be able to collect all the data, it's required to create a program using the Phidget library. On this week, I've been making some changes on my ROS Package so it can read the data not only from Arduino but also from the Phidget InterfaceKit. At the moment the program get the data from the hardware asynchronously (IR sensor at 40Hz and the other sensors at 1000Hz) and publishes it on ROS. 

Next, it's required to add the GTK interface to calibrate the data, this should be capable of making the pedal calibration and save it into a file. After this the interface would be able to monitor the action on the pedals using the calibration file or not - Figure 5.

Figure 5 - Program scheme.

Cheers!