We are moving forward with our smart, connected balls idea.
We drafted an initial design document, outlining what kinds of capabilities these balls would have, how they would behave, and what sort of hardware might be involved.
After some searching, we also found an existing product: a beach ball with a central pocket that can hold a glow stick. We’ve acquired one of the smaller versions to take a closer look at and start building some test versions, and it looks promising. We believe this ball will be a great base to work with, so long as we can house all of our hardware inside.
We presented our current physical and behavioral designs to our instructors, and they like the direction we’re going. We have our work cut out for us for the rest of the semester!
The team has also been making progress on the hardware front. We can scan with the WiFi module, and our device can communicate with our central server. Unfortunately, the Bluetooth modules we received were not what we ordered and lacked certain capabilities, so we will have to find new ones before we can continue any Bluetooth development. For now, we will be sticking with WiFi.
Early next week, we aim to have an initial prototype that can communicate with the server, use WiFi to gather proximity data, and possibly make use of an accelerometer.