Status Report Week 2: Sourav

This past week I accomplished several things with respect to the capstone project. I continued to play around with the pi cameras to understand their functionality and what they were capable of. I did extended research into the output format of the pi camera and what format would provide us with the best compression vs quality vs ease of use. I discovered that the pi camera has h.264 hardware accelerated encoding so it was decided that we’d move forward with that format. I then began research on the motor drivers and how the speed control would work. I discovered that the python gpio library would be sufficient for this purpose, as it would allow me to write to the pins individually, which is really the only functionality required to implement the feature. Finally, I researched into what libraries I was going to use for the TCP sockets to communicate with the laptops. I looked into a new experimental Google protocol named QUIC which is supposed to deliver packets faster, allowing for lower latency for controller input, but decided against it due to the fact that it was built on UDP as opposed to TCP, which would require more complicated error handling.  I also researched whether using FreeRTOS was useful for this application, but decided against it because the freeRTOS ports for raspberry pi are not stable.