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Category: Weekly Status Reports

Team Status Update for 12/5

Team Status Update for 12/5

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This past week, we worked on integrating,testing, and collecting metrics. We met up multiple times throughout the week, staying on call with each other while Heather assembled the physical device and troubleshooting together. We at least put together all the pieces — motor control, CV face detection, and acoustic location — and inevitably ran into bugs along the way. Our biggest hurdles were occasional crashes, laggy video feed, both audio and video detection having sporadic wildly off readings, and the…

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Edward’s Status Update for 12/5

Edward’s Status Update for 12/5

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This week was the final push for integration. I met up almost daily with Heather and Anna to make sure that everything was connected properly. I also had to program a lot more solutions since we also changed how the motors would be moving. The motors still had a limited range but in order to still center a face in those cases I manually cropped the frame as much as possible to then add a black border to create an…

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Heather’s Status Update for 12/5

Heather’s Status Update for 12/5

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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…

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Anna’s Status Update for 12/5

Anna’s Status Update for 12/5

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We spent a lot of time together on Zoom this past week for integration and while Heather assembled the physical device. First and foremost, I worked with Edward to edit my audio detection code to be able to communicate with main. Before Heather added in the audio portion of the device, I wanted to make some optimizations. The acoustic location was updating the direction of the speaker far too often — all the readings would be around the same value…

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Anna’s Status Update for 11/21

Anna’s Status Update for 11/21

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I spent this past week learning about SPI works on the Jetson, configuring the new MCP3008 ADC and the analog mics, and testing the setup. Unfortunately, even after all the research that had gone into choosing the MCP3008 and learning about SPI communication, I found that the MCP3008’s 190kHz sampling rate drops to about 600Hz (so 200SPS per microphone…) in reality. I did my best to maximize the sampling rate, knowing that the primary culprits for the immense slowdown were…

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Team Status Update for 11/21

Team Status Update for 11/21

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For the upcoming weeks we have given ourselves the deadline to finish up the overall project in the next week and a half. We know that the week after Thanksgiving we need to spend testing and getting results for the final presentation so we need to be done with all of the development on the actual project by then. We will actually start fine tuning and testing the parts that we can this week and at the end of the…

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Heather’s Status Update for 11/21

Heather’s Status Update for 11/21

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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…

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Edward’s Status Update for 11/21

Edward’s Status Update for 11/21

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This week I spent time to better enhance the video feed that was being passed to the computer. It was easier than expected since we only needed to change how our windows were instantiated. After doing so I then began the code to better detect a speaker when there are multiple faces. The algorithm is still quite naive but in order to increase correctness I went about to consider the following things. The first was to account for issues caused…

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Team Status Update for 11/14

Team Status Update for 11/14

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For the audio, Anna has been looking into various kinds of microphones and ADCs and recently obtained a new ADC with a maximum sampling rate of 200kSPS. However, they have come to the realization that, without a dedicated microcontroller with a real-time OS, we cannot achieve this max sampling rate, since the Jetson runs Linux, a general-purpose OS. We will only be able to get a fraction of 200sps, but this could still be adequate for our purposes. We just…

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Edward’s Status Update for 11/14

Edward’s Status Update for 11/14

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This week we had started off preparing for the first demo. Since we got chosen for a later date we met again to discuss if we would continue working on the project for the first demo. We spent time preparing through a practice demo amongst ourselves and had all the parts ready to demo for Vyas and Cindy. Given the new arrangements with the video passthrough, I realized that we can now fully utilize the two cameras set up. Since…

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