This week I designed a basic base to test the face centering for the base rotation. The test went well; the camera was able to rotate and center on my face as expected. I then moved onto assembling the final prototype. I took apart a cake decorating turntable to work for the base and am making sure everything is securely attached everywhere to reduce the vibrations we encountered with the initial prototype. Tomorrow (Sunday), Eddy and I are going to test the full prototype and fine tune any rotations as needed.

I also tested the changes Eddy made to enhance video quality and get two cameras working. My only concern is that there seems to be a bit of a video jump for some reason whenever the cameras are switched. Right now, I think there are more important things to work on than this issue though.

  I spent some time on trying to get the servo working as well, but I’m pretty stuck on it. I’ve been looking at the signals on the oscilloscope and I really don’t understand the math between the differing frequencies and the duty cycles. I think the issue is there’s a fairly large discrepancy between what frequency the PCA9685 is set to and what it actually is. My earlier idea of setting the duty cycle to 100% for a few cycles also doesn’t seem to be super feasible because I haven’t found a way to keep track of knowing how many full cycles has passed.

I also spent time talking to Anna on the microphone set up. Ann is having issues with their solution which should be in their writeup. I’m going to spend tonight integrating I2S microphones into the prototype in the blind spots of the cameras, just so that we have something working. Hopefully, Anna’s solution will be better and I can integrate that into it by the end of the week. But, Eddy and I want to get going testing the microphones with the whole system to some degree, so that is my current plan going forward.

So this week, really gunning on the microphones and testing. If I have time, I’ll look back into the servos.