This week, I first worked on preparing for our final presentation. I practiced for the first few days of the week memorizing and rehearsing the slide deck and what I would say to make sure that the presentation went smoothly.
We also worked further on assembling our new housing out of 3D printed arms and acrylic body panels. We also installed a hinge for the top for easier access to the inside. We glued the bottom inside the hexagon and fixed the side panels with custom 120 degree brackets to form an even hexagon. The arms are bolted on, and the walls are tacked together with glue at the top. I also made the wiring adapters that go from the 2mm bullet connectors from the motors to the 3.5mm connectors for the ESCs.
Lastly, we performed about 7 drops with our system to characterize performance. While doing this, we noticed an issue with the ability to SSH into the raspberry pi above the drop zone because of wifi, so we amended our script to wait until it receives signal over UART from the Arduino to start the detection script. This way we run the python script while indoors and then when we hit the button to start the Arduino, it triggers the python script to start without needing to SSH in and run it directly. This helps our efficiency with performing drops. Additionally, we tested in a few different lighting conditions, ranging from bright sunny to very dark and with tuning our threshold, we were able to detect the target circle in both scenarios. A future possibility is to have a dynamic tuner that changes threshold based on amount of light or another metric. After some more testing, we will be looking to create our video and write up our testing data in the report.