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11/23/19 Team Status Update

Enes Palaz Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

I worked on debugging the connection of our own board to galvanometers and the laser. Jake is working on further fixes of the problems diagnosed. Also, this week, I and Eliana identified potential methods of interpolation to reduce the number of points in contours.

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

Everything is on schedule.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Integration of our own board to Pi and galvanometers. And integration of the laser setup to our board and calibration of color values for those lasers in DAC code.

Jake Zimmer Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
    • I tested the safety sub-board this week and found an issue the safety microcontroller corrupting the output from the dac. I have determined what the issue most likely is and will fix it tomorrow. Upon fixing it, I will update this document.

 

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • On track.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • Fix the board
    • Design and build the mounting and enclosure for everything

Eliana Cohen Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
    • Assisted with integration/testing of new board in current setup
    • Confirmed interpolation point method resulted in 10fps goal on hardware
    • Started planning 3D CAD design, the laser-cutting will occur over break

 

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • On Track
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • Laser cut and assemble the housing for the system
    • Work out any other additional integration bugs
    • Test new lasers with system and debug any additional tracing clarity issues

Team Status Update

 

  • What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready? 

 

Due to the current laser diodes we’re using, we have traces (caused by delay in turning off laser diodes) that interfere with the visibility of the rendered frames. We will test with more expensive lasers that should have less of a delta turn-off time, which should result in a more clear image. 

Also there’s a risk that the safety subsystem might need more intensive redesigns, but we have the skill to add botch-wiring and other repairs even if our initial board design isn’t perfect.

 

  • Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward? 

 

Ordered newer lasers that contained R, G, and B lasers, but no additional changes.

 

  • Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred. 

Posted on

11/17/19 Team Status Update

Enes Palaz Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I finished debugging and merging of all software parts. So right now we can draw the contours from video feed live as shown in the video provided in the team section. Also, I started to work on optimization of number of points in contours to draw approximately 1200 points per frame. I am working with Eliana on this.

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

Everything is on schedule.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Finish optimization of gaussian blurring and interpolation of found edges so we can go back down to 1200 points per frame range.

Jake Zimmer Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week I got the sub pcb fully working. This means that we will no longer have to do a complicated and lengthy setup every time we want to test a new feature. Additionally, I managed to get code upload working on the board and have uploaded a preliminary version of the safety program. I still need to figure out how to increase the speed of the ADC. 

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I am on schedule.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to finalize the safety firmware and begin mounting everything in an enclosure.

Eliana Cohen Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
    • Worked on high-level OpenCV filtering to get point acquisition down to 1.2k max points per frame
  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

Caught up

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • Work on hardware box setup
    • Max cap the laser light values to prevent blank points
    • Help debug safety subsystem microcontroller if needed

Team Status Update

  • What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready? 

The current risk is the set of problems that we are having during integration of our software submodules. For this not to be a serious delay, both Enes and Eliana are actively working on getting this running. We believe we can solve these issues like we solved previous performance and ILDA conversion issues.

  • Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward? 

 

  • Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred. 

Posted on

11/09/19 Team Update

Enes Palaz Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I continued working on connecting double buffer to ILDA conversion and DAC subsystem. Because of the asynchronous nature of all these subsystems debugging takes time. I managed to identify key breaking points and actively working on them. Also this week we encountered another bug caused by OpenCV package that prevents us from setting camera resolution so I am also working on compiling OpenCV manually to our resolution specifications.

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

We are not currently behind but I expect integration to take one more week so I moved them forward in our schedule while we continue working on other deliverables in parallel. No extra action needed to catch up since this problem doesn’t affect other hardware and fabrication tasks.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I am planning to finish debugging the integration of our software submodules and successfully compile OpenCV manually to our specifications.

Jake Zimmer Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

I acquired the parts and finished assembling the boards for the system. Right now, I have left some parts off because during testing, we found them to not be required. These parts consist of the op amp circuitry and were easily bypassed. If we decide in the future to use the opamp, it can easily be added in. More testing needs to be done to the board during the integration phase.

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I was not behind schedule but the order of some tasks changed. I have updated the schedule to reflect them.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

By the end of next week, the board hardware should be all done and the physical enclosure should be mocked up.

 

Eliana Cohen Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
    • Was away for most of the week for job interviews, so wasn’t able to accomplish anything.

 

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I’m behind at the moment to catch up on other classwork, but I had anticipated I’d be unavailable for this week and so the time was pre-budgeted. I’ll pick up on debugging code and integrating hardware next week.

 

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • Help setup and test Safety Subsystem
    • Debug ILDA/DAC libraries depending on what still needs to be completed by mid-week

Team Status Update

 

  • What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready? 

The current risk is the set of problems that we are having during integration of our software submodules. For this not to be a serious delay, both Enes and Eliana are actively working on getting this running. We believe we can solve these issues like we solved previous performance and ILDA conversion issues.

 

  • Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward? 

 

  • Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred. 

 

See attached.

Captone_Team_A2_-_LaSEEr11092019

Posted on

11/02/19 Team Update

Enes Palaz Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

I managed to edit my code to fit the requirements of the ILDA file format because there were some ambiguous parts like format being Big endian and also center of the coordinate system. As a result of this, we were able to successfully project an ILDA file generated by our own code. It can be seen in the team update section.

I also worked on integration of ILDa frame generation, buffer and DAC code with Eliana. It is still in progress.

 

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

No, everything is on schedule.

 

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I am hoping to complete the integration of other software parts and move to designing a case to put all the components in.

 

Jake Zimmer Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
    • I worked on the embedded firmware for the safety subsystem. The initial results are promising and it is almost ready to be actually deployed on the board.
    • As such, the boards arrived earlier than expected. BOM has been finished and parts should arrive wednesday or so.

 

  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • On track, but could see a potential slowdown once boards are assembled due to errors. There is not a great way to prevent this at this stage but it should have been mitigated by the design review that I performed. If there are errors, then they will be resolved with jumpers.

 

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • Fully assembled boards and safety system on boards and working.

 

Eliana Cohen Status Update

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
    • Integrated high level software pipeline with low level software, with assistance from Enes
    • Modified high-level software for greater performance improvements by using statically-allocated arrays rather than vectors in C++
    • Confirmed timing of whole system was in specs, 30-50ms ILDA conversion time simultaneously with 30-50ms frame to contour conversion time while another thread also reads from system’s double buffer.
    • Helped debug hardware system via analyzing ILDA format, now have demo ready for monday demonstrating laser image projection
  •  Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • On track, though waiting on boards to debug next week.

 

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • Since I’ll be away for most of next week for interviews, I won’t be able to accomplish as much. 
      • Help debug any other hardware/software integration issues with new combined software pipeline when I return
      • When boards arrive, begin work on assembling them and testing them

Team Status Update

 

  • What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready? 

Timing is much less of an issue now that we’ve worked on optimizing our software pipeline some more. Ensuring our safety subsystem works is then our next biggest issue now that we’ve confirmed our hardware is able to render images. We have less time to test this system as board production eats time from our schedule, so we’re preparing to make up for that time by planning in more time to work on the boards once they arrive. DAC-speed was also confirmed to be less of a concern than expected, since we are able to draw more than 12k points per second. 

 

 

Additionally, board errors could be a risk but by choosing relatively large parts for the board, creating jumps and fixes should be easy.

 

  • Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward? 

 

No major changes, some minor optimizations to our software stack.

 

  • Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.