The beginning of this week was a bit of a grind to prepare for the demo. I mostly had my microphones working but found that the microphone delay was a bit finicky. I’ve known that the microphones each have a different amount of delay, and I spent a good amount of time last week figuring out the approximate delay of two of the mics relative to one, then hardcoded this into my acoustic location program. However, when I demoed for…
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…
The plan laid out last week about using multiple I2C mics and a much simpler acoustic location algorithm was scrapped. I actually decided to abandon I2C mics altogether, since the sampling rate was simply too garbage. Instead, I resolved to find other higher-sampling mics and spent the first couple days of the week researching. I found some mini USB mics on Amazon that could sample at 44100 Hz — which is significantly better than the previous I2C mics, by two…
Planning ahead for the next 4 weeks, we have a majority of the integration done along with the passthrough of the video actually getting to the computer. The most significant risk is still the video transmission. We’re able to transmit video over to a host computer, but that aspect still needs work as the current quality of the imaging is nowhere near the framerate that we would like it to be at. In addition, we’re still working through getting the…
So this week I was able to make some more progress with Heather in terms of getting a video feed through to a computer. We were able to send a receive video through gstreamer from the nano to the computer and see some of the frames. The big issue that still remains here is that the streaming of the bits may not be fast enough but we might be able to make use of a better streaming protocol using ethernet…
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…
Our biggest concern still remains as we try to communicate the video stream from the Nano to a computer. The original idea where we edit the kernel for the USB video protocol was too complicated and we couldn’t figure it out so we transitioned the focus to seeing if we could communicate anything to the computer and found that we could use gstreamer to pass the stream around. With the initial testing we were able to get a connection but…
This past week, I played around with different arrangements and orientations of the microphones. I first tried a very simple linear arrangement with the three microphones, expecting the microphone nearest to me (the acoustic source) to reflect that it had picked up the sound first, but for some reason, it appeared that they were detecting my voice out of order. I’m still not quite sure why this is happening, but it would obviously throw a wrench into my acoustic location…
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…
Earlier this week I was able to restructure the code that we previously used for testing and merged it into the new framework. It still needs a little more robust testing and the new servo motor control still needs to be added back in since right now the motors that do work are just the stepper motors. I also finally defined the final messages that will be sent to motors and that are expected by each of the programs. If…