Celine:
The first half of this week I spent researching cameras that can interface with a raspberry pi, and ordering the camera I found to be sufficient for our initial experimentation, other parts we as a team found to be necessary for an initial implementation, and the connecting cable for the camera. I found 8MP and 14MP Arducams, both of which can connect to raspberry pis. However, the 14MP camera requires a USB interface board in order to be able to connect to the pi. As the most recent USB version implemented for this camera is a USB3, and no raspberry pi currently supports USB3, I decided that it would be better to stick with the 8MP camera for now. After we buy the raspberry pi and gauge our budget, we can determine if a camera upgrade is worth it. Additionally this week I have been setting up OpenCV on my personal laptop. I will be testing the setup this weekend.
Next week, I hope to have tested out using OpenCV with some pre-trained Tesseract net. I also hope to have laser cut a duplicate gear to complement the one Indu ordered this week. We will be aiming to have the chain belt mechanism implemented this week, as we have the necessary parts ordered for it already.
Effie:
This week I looked further into some hats and began designing out how the pin connections will need to be laid out to properly connect the pi to some encoder motors and servos and the camera and a speaker and mic, and I looked up details of how to install drivers. We ordered some more parts and this week plan to order the remainder to get to testing initial ideas.
Indu:
This week I continued researching the methods used in page turning devices and worked on deciding what parts would be used for testing purposes. I also ordered some of these parts, and have an initial idea of the next set of parts I am planning to order next week, such as the motor that will drive the device.
I have only initial calculations for the page-turning device, such as for the conveyor chain being around 3 feet long in the final device. I need to further work on these calculations, to better design a schematic for the project. That is what I plan on doing next week. I also want to actually start building a test device next week with the parts that Celine and I have ordered.