iContact

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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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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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Met all my goals from last week except for testing out multiple cameras because I spent that time doing some research on how to connect the Jetson Nano to a laptop. I think for now, I’m going to try and see how doing USB to TTY works based on some reading I did this week. I should be able to transfer data, but I have to make sure that there isn’t too much latency and that I can then use…

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This week I verified all the components were working. I successfully set up the Jetson Nano, and got communications working with a Adafruit I2S microphone, multiple servos, and a Raspberry Pi V2 Camera Module.  Setting up the camera module went smoothly and I can get a camera feed to the Jetson. When I get a second module this week, I think it will be an easy integration. I have also installed Jetpack to prepare for working on CV with Eddy…

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