This week, we heavily focused on our separate parts, as we try to get something cool together to demo. We did get more parts delivered, including the additional LIDAR sensors, so there was a lot of excitement in testing out more of our system and seeing how it measures up to our goals! Here’s a picture of Evan and Will testing out a LIDAR sensor outside on Wednesday.
Spent way too much time working on setting up the app to bluetooth communicate with the raspberry pi, because it turns out (after much digging) that the sample github repo I found will not work for what I need. So I started from scratch, using the CoreBluetooth framework, working heavily with the CBCentralManager class and the CBPeripheral class. Really hoping this will work this time, but not at the point of testing yet. Plan to do more work on Sunday…
This week I came up with my initial approach for features for images (a bunch of blocks of percentage of key points of the images (i.e. 2×4 blocks). The exact number of blocks will be optimized once I have training/test data pictures. After collecting some photos with our camera at about 8m away, I have decided that only a certain section of the image will potentially contain the object we are trying to detect (in the middle of the image)…
LiDAR sensors working together: I was able to get all three lidars to send and receive signals with the RaspberyPi with the TTL converter. I crimped the wires for the lidars so they could easily be attached and detached from the TTL USB converter. Then I edited and debugged the simple python scripts to initialize and wr/rd values to/from all three LiDAR sensors. Using a simple round-robin scheme it prints the strength, and distance values to the terminal of all three…