Google was very accommodating for the GCI and overall I thought it was a really great experience. We had the chance to listen to various googlers speak about their work and what they’ve been working on. This includes: project FI, Waymo, chrome books, and open source copyright. The talks we’re spaced out on the second and final day of the trip. I had the chance to interact with other open source organizations: Ubuntu and Apertium.

The Arduino IDE is a really good starting environment but I was looking for something a bit more flexible. Atmel studio is built for AVR chips but the environment obscures a lot of the process and adding an Ardunio library prevents the IDE from properly building the binary and working out how to fix the build was just too much of a hassle. This configuration allows the use of other environments besides the Ardunio IDE such as Vscode and Clion. Scons is a build system centered around python and can be easily configured to produce the correct binaries for AVR using avr-gcc, avr-g++, and avr-objcopy. The basic process is to compile the source using the avr-g++, avr-gcc and then converting the compiled object files to ihex. The build process can also produce the necessary .hex files that can be flashed with Mplab IPE or avrdude.

Introduction

The Micro Logger is a small wearable sensor that logs gyro and acceleration data directly to an SD card. This first design was kept very simple and the footprint was minimized down as much as possible. Going forward, there are some basic plans to replace the sd card with an e.mmc module and solder the connections of the battery directly to the board with a charging IC. This should make it possible to charge battery through a micro-usb interface. Variations of this in the future can explore different mem sensors and compare characteristic performance.

Hardware