Jiyeon:
This week, Jiyeon finished text orientation and improved efficiency and readability of my code. She initially got error from Tesseract’s image_to_osd function, which corrects the text orientation, but she couldn’t fix the error. So instead of using image_to_osd function, she wrote a function to check the skewness and correct the image. Additionally, her other main concern was efficiency. This week, she worked on improving efficiency and readability of her code by breaking down my code into multiple helper function and files and making sure the code stops if a matching text is found from our product info dictionary. She also wrote a helper function to save our product info to json file which would be useful for web app later. She made a good amount progress on the efficiency but this definitely still needs some improvement since the user would not want to wait ~6 sec each product to be scanned. For next week, she is hoping to improve more efficiency with consistent test images.
Raymond:
So for last week right, Raymond was primarily working on a couple of design challenge. What he have observed is that there are similarities in hardware and software engineering. The similarity is that there are challenges along the way to finish a project, and sometimes when we see a challenge he has to find ways to pass the challenge. In software, it might be switching to different APIs, different library vendors etc. Sometimes one function call provided by one party works, and the others don’t, and often we don’t know why(probably we didn’t understand the input well enough, the output well enough, and the overall function well enough. A lot the times this happens in math as well, when we don’t know the exact size and dimension and type of a variable, and we don’t know the meaning of certain symbol, the abstract and geometric meaning, and we don’t understand it well enough it often leads us to misuse it, forgetting to use it, not understanding the derivations, etc.
So what he learned last week is that in hardware, we also need to have some basic understanding in the laws of physics and the properties of the materials. He thinks last week most of the knowledge domain he utitlized was from Physics I, Newtonian physics, in terms of friction, surface area, torque. Some basics application of physics(not numerial, but some high level concepts).
Anyways, he get the belt working at half of the length. Now the problem is our design is not able to carry a lot of the weight because we have hollow areas on the belt, but since this is a proof of concept we will just put light weight stuffs on. For next week, he plans to focus on raspberry pi. We are on schedule.
Overall, Raymond and Jiyeon made great progress this week. We will tackle problems together next week using our knowledge base.