This week, I mainly helped the team complete more tests to understand how our device behaves under its proposed use case. We noticed during our last tests that a lot of spin was induced from the unsynchronized dropping of two people letting go of the device. As a result, we decided one person should drop it. During each test, I held up the parachutes from their center, held the device over the edge of the Pausche bridge and waited for Lahari to initiate the system using the buttons we installed. Once she pressed it, I waited for the motor to spin up, and let go of the parachutes once it was on full thrust. The spin issue was solved, yet we found that there was insufficient thrust.
To fix this, we are going to add an additional motor to each side. After Vikram cut out a new piece of wood that has enough space for two motors, we worked together to measure various distances to ensure the motors were equidistant from the middle mounting point, as well as to drill the necessary holes for mounting. I then drilled the holes and attached the motors. To test both motors working at the same time, I suggested we use the lab clip wires with banana plug ends to quickly prototype a splitter without needing to solder anything just yet. Then, we worked together to hook up the system. Finally, as Vikram held the splitter, I held the motors and Lahari held the wires in place, I turned on the servo tested and we found that the two motors worked together. As for my vectorization algorithm in regards to this change, I will simply feed in same PWM duty cycle to both motors on any given side since they are both pointing in the same general direction, so the output should still remain as 3 PWM duty cycle values.
Additionally, I also helped the team draw a circle to test the circle detection algorithm at a larger scale. We tied a string to a sharpie, and while Vikram and Lahari held the string in place, I drew on the foam-core, creating a circle as the string acted as the radius (of 0.5 m based on previous calculations described in the past based on scaling up the detection of a 5 cm radius circle from 1 meter away). Due to the uneven nature of this process, our circle was not perfect, and the resulting edge was too thin (even after we filled it in). To solve this, Lahari then printed a perfect circle with a much thicker edge, and glued it to the foam-core. I then ran the python detection script on my laptop, holding up the camera as Vikram moved the circle further and further away. At first, we noticed the range was no where near our required 40 feet range. I noticed the camera quality was set to 640×480, so I proposed that we change it to 720p (1280×720). We tested this both indoors and outdoors, and found a maximum detection range of around 50 feet, which fits our use case.