This week all of our efforts have been put into making the system more stable and consistent. This involved much trial and error and tampering with our system. I improved our color picking algorithm to also consider the color of neighbors when selecting a color to use. This prevents the output image from becoming too simple and uninteresting, allowing for a less perfect color to be used for the purpose of more contrast in the output image. Additionally, I changed our method for performing fill in strokes to perform large zig-zag strokes rather than individual lines, which allows for smoother operation and more continuous motion. The most important work done this week was related to power supply optimizations. We found that the issue of our motors jamming was due to insufficient power. After using a power supply with more current we found that the system was able to perform with almost no jams, and allowed us to produce a much clearer image. However, the higher power usage seemed to damage our stepper motor board and we were forced to use our backup. We are now very hesitant to use the higher power supply as it may destroy our last board. We are continuing to try to find other methods of powering the motors to circumvent our jamming issue, which is largely the only issue remaining that is preventing us from getting clean looking results.
Overall this week we have remained on schedule. We were able to produce a much higher quality image and have found ways to address almost all of our issues. We are continuing to work on the power supply issues to hopefully eliminate the jamming problem and if we are successful in this our project will be in a much more complete state. Before our demo on Monday we hope to be able to produce a painted image for more complex image inputs and display a video of this during our demo.