Author: darinr

Last Sunday, I worked on finalizing our design slides for the presentation. Later in the week on Thursday I picked up the ultrasonic sensor that was delivered. I wrote a piece of code in Arduino that detects the distance of the nearby object with the ultrasonic sensor, which can be incorporated in our product later. For now, it prints the distance to the object on the console but later this would trigger the camera to capture an image. I simulated this with the Tinkercad that I was using last week, and once I have all the physical components to connect it with the Arduino I will test to see how accurate our ultrasonic sensor is with the object detection. I also looked more into setting up serial communication between Arduino and Jetson, in order to implement the image capture triggering feature. And since our camera is now delivered (which is not picked up yet), I looked into how the Jetson can capture the image when it receives the signal that an object is detected. I found some Python code online that does a similar job, which does not look too complicated. By next week, along with working on our design report, I hope to start setting up all the hardware components and perform some basic tests.

This week I worked with my teammates on the design presentation and we made some changes to the design. The hardware part will mostly remain the same, so I continued with my research on the hardware components I will be working on. We finalized which model we wanted to use, and placed the orders for the ultrasonic distance sensor and the Arducam camera.

I also found a software called Tinkercad that allows you to simulate circuits. I saw that it includes the exact ultrasonic sensor that I wanted to use, and it allows you to write code. I played around with it a little and hopefully this will help me test and verify that it works before I start working with the actual components. Tinkercad lets me do something like this:

I am a little bit behind schedule, due to many overlapping deadlines and upcoming exams. I have done research on how the components work and what pieces of code I would have to write, but I don’t have any solid components yet. In the next week, since I expect to have a bit more time, I hope have a more solid design of the hardware and start setting them up once the orders arrive.