Category: Pablo’s Status Report

This week, the focus was on getting the system integrated and set up in my dining room. The breadboards and wires luckily arrived  sooner than expected and I was able to have the image capture nodes set up! Image from the node below:

Still awaiting final integration with the server as I don’t have the server code yet, but an easy workaround is just automated batch uploading of the images to the model. I am task complete on my end and will now transition to helping out other areas to ensure we are fully functional by final presentation time.

This week I worked on getting approval for setting up in sorrels, putting together a housing for the node, and doing the reading assignment. I went to Sorrells and got the contact information for the people I need to talk to (Amy Perrier and Barry
Schles) and contacted them, but unfortunately didn’t receive a response before leaving Pittsburgh unfortunately. Earlier this week I made a mock up of the housing for the node and reworked it since the portable chargers were larger than anticipated. The housing is ready to be laser cut when I return to campus.

With this week, I am behind schedule and will need to work over Thanksgiving break to catch up. I plan on gathering datasets from my home to help the image diversity for the ML model and integrating server code when that is finished since I have now been shipped the final set of components for the full node network and am ready for implementation.

This week, I worked on getting low power mode working with the ArduCam and testing the battery life of the nodes. The current battery life was almost 4 days (5500 images captured and uploaded), so once low power mode is properly implemented and it passes the timing requirements, we should be well within all requirements for the node. I encountered an issue when doing battery life testing that a portion of my images were not fully uploaded, leaving vertical lines at the bottom, and some were not even recognized as images. I’m hoping that this is an issue due to me using a very simple test server I set up and uploading at 6 times the anticipated rate, but I’ve talked with Krish about it and it shouldn’t be too hard of a problem to overcome for the preliminary data sets.

I am currently on schedule, but next week will be very tight as I am still waiting on server code to integrate, confirmation of approval to mount nodes in Sorrells, the reading assignment, and heading home on Friday.

This week, I finished the single node. I had to overcome two major problems: Outdated libraries and incompatible hardware. The libraries for the ArduCam were written for Arduino and were reworked by someone else to work for the Particle Photon. Unfortunately, the pinout and macros for the Particle Argon are different, so this introduced a slew of errors. Luckily, I managed to rework the library much faster than anticpated and got the Camera Node up and running. The next issue came when trying to make the node completely standalone, the lack of voltage from the LiPo battery. I realized I was running into an error when removing from the computer because it was drawing extra voltage from the micro usb. The solution I used was moving from LiPo, to portable chargers. With this I now have images being captured and sent remotely over TCP! (picture from the Camera Node below!)

To be quite honest, I wanted to have this done much earlier, but the past week has been rough mentally due to the election. I am slightly behind, but readjusted our gantt chart and are still within the margin we laid out for ourselves. I anticipate to be completely done, with the Camera Node network set up in Sorrells 2 weeks from now. The next week, I plan on building the housing for the node and capturing the preliminary data set from my apartment.

I unfortunately did not get as much done this week as I had anticipated. This week was more hectic than usual, and I realized I had a flaw in my implementation, meaning that I have to refactor my code to correct the error.

I spent a good amount of time of the ethics reading and response this week. I found the fictional Ad Empathy technology design to be scarily realistic and probable uses for nefarious purposes hit a little too close to home considering Cambridge Analytica and the upcoming election. I suppose it is Halloween, so a bit of spookiness is to be expected haha. Additionally, thinking about ethics and how it relates to our project was a little sobering; I realized that if this project were to grow to become a commercial application, data security needs to be a priority as this information can be harmful if used for individual tracking.

I am currently a week behind schedule on delivering images good enough to start developing the model. I intend to spend this upcoming week setting up the node in my apartment so that I can start getting preliminary images sent, so Krish can continue working on the model.