This week I completed designing the stroke algorithm and wrote the code for it. Using Chris’ stroke plotting function, I was able to simulate the drawing of both the outline strokes and fill-in strokes. The outline stroke algorithm is very quick and can draw outlines for complex images in under a minute. The fill-in stroke algorithm is quite slow. Complex images take 10’s of minutes to completely finish drawing, depending on the brush width. Last week I had said that I would finish the design of this algorithm and have simulations by this week, and I fulfilled that goal.
My progress is on schedule this week because I have finished the requirement for demo day for the software part. The goal was to finish the algorithm and the simulation framework. Since the algorithm took very long to finish, Chris helped me by constructing the stroke plotting functions. I’ve tested the algorithm on multiple images, so it works for sure. This means that all that is left for the stroke drawing algorithm are optimizations to the algorithm and how the code is written.
For the next week, I will start testing the stroke drawing on the physical system. However, Eric and Chris would have to make sure all the controls work before that, so while they work on that, I’ll work on optimizing the code. Since it runs very slowly for fill-in strokes, I’ll have to either come up with some optimizations that make it faster (such as removing for-loops and using more optimal data structures), or porting the code into C++, which is a much faster algorithm.