Heather’s Status Update for 12/5
From last week, I got the “base” rotation working. I implemented it by having 2 servos moving in the same rotation axis. I also added in Anna’s solution for the microphones. From there we continued to fine tune integration. This week we were finalizing out integration. We ran into some bugs with latency, audio detection, and motor movement. Edward managed to fix the latency by checking for facial detection only if there is audio difference. Eddy and I also paused…
Heather’s Status Update for 11/21
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…
Heather’s Status Update for 11/14
I worked very hard to get a smooth demo going earlier this week. All I did was finalize all the work that I did the week prior. Regarding servos, I was able to get the expected range of motion through python and integrate the servo into the physical prototype. I then encountered problems when trying to integrate the software for the servos to the motor controller. Currently, I am controlling the servos by adjusting the frequency of the pca. For…
Heather’s Status Update for 11/7
Worked on three things this week: servos, video transmission, and integration. For the servos, I’m managing to get some movement from the servos, but not the full range I expected. I think it has something to do with the duty cycle. At least it is better than last week, where they weren’t working at all. The issue had to do with a difference in frequency, so when I changed that I stopped getting an error everytime I tried to set…
Heather’s Status Update for 10/31
This week I spent a lot of time on servo and video communication. Nothing works yet. My brain hurts. Current issue with servos is there is something wrong in the duty cycle calculation. Whatever calculation is being used for the library servo code, the calculated duty cycle is out of range of the maximum. I have compared the ServoKit Library to the MotorKit Library. Both are using the same servo code, the board uses the same chip, the default frequencies…
Heather’s Status Update for 10/24
After talking to Vyas, we’re gonna just use a webcam for now. That simplifies my job so I turned my attention this week back to working on the physical prototype. I got the elevator working! It’s a little jittery, but I haven’t figured out if it is because of the stepper motor, or lag to facial detection, or a combination of the two. The goal for this week is to get that smooth and get the angle for top and…
Team’s Status Update for 10/24
Our week began with a scramble to complete our design review — we worked on finishing up the parts we had assigned to each other to write, creating diagrams, and formatting/revising the document as a whole. Altogether, we feel confident in the content we produced and hope that this will entail a much less arduous process of writing the final report. After finishing the design review, we met up to discuss how all of our components would be integrated and…
Heather’s Status Update for 10/17
Big risk to the project identified this week when doing the design presentation. We realized we had spent a lot of time solidifying the different components for the peripheral components, and not enough time on the communication between the Jetson Nano and a computer. So this week, I spent a lot of time researching this topic and came up with a hopefully implementable solution. I should be able to change the Linux kernel for the Jetson Nano using the Nvidia…
Team’s Status Update for 10/10
One of the things that we realized was that we can’t actually make use of four mics with the I2S connections. This is due to our original idea banked on being able to put in two inputs per I2S port but the problem is that the inputs from the mics only get read as a single mixed input which we can’t separate out. That means that we are forced to use only one mic per input which can potentially hurt…