Been working with my team and my Professor and TA about how to transition our project into something that is doable given the new “design constraints” that COVID-19 has imposed. We have been working to figure out ways to keep the core of our project largely the same but involve no physical parts in order to make the project able to be completed while socially distancing as well as keeping the project in a state that will not have each member of the group tied to a piece of the project that another member may be actively working on, thus decoupling each member’s work.
Andrew’s Status Update for 3/15
We focused heavily on aspects of our design report that needed to be fleshed out and added more technical details to describe how our project would work. I worked on a variety of sections, but focused mainly on how the OpenCV portions of the project would work. I worked on fleshing out some different aspects of the OpenCV pipeline, including extra testing of what has already been worked on. Overall last week (of school before spring break) was super rough for me, so I’ve been a bit behind.
Next week will be focused on figuring out what our new project will be and overall what to do given everything that has happened. Super up in the air right now.
Aneek’s Status Update for 3/15
We focused on completing our design report and making many small but important decisions that came up over the course of writing it, which has further defined our project more technically. I mainly worked on my sections for the design report, as well as formatting and assembling the complete document after my teammates finished their sections, which took a surprisingly long time! MS Word formatting isn’t particularly intuitive. I also started tinkering around with OpenCV so I can assist Andrew with the CV portions of our project. The Hand/Tap detection code is done but hasn’t been tested with the Duvetyne fabric yet, so when that comes in, I will switch gears back to that to make sure that section is complete.
My plan for next week will be dependent on what our team and our faculty and TA mentors come up with to accommodate the move to remote instruction.
Team Status Update for 3/15
The week before spring break, we were hard at work completing our the first draft of out final report. It was a great time to evaluate all the progress we have made and work out the kinks of our design. We ordered all of our hardware. All we have left to purchase should be the PVC. As a team, we are still working on our individual tasks. We will likely begin integrating when we all get back from spring break. Then, we will receive all of our ordered parts and begin constructing the frame.
However, due to CMU’s move to remote instruction, our final project could be changing, so our plan for the next week and beyond is in flux right now. We’ll see what we come up with and look forward to completing this project, in this form or another!
Connor’s Status Update for 3/15
The first draft of our final report is complete! The process of completing it forced us to think very critically about the small details of our project. As a result, I feel more confident about our design. In addition, it led me to take a change of course this week. Instead of building the frame, I decided to begin planning out the Animations & Display Builder. I realized that this will take more time than we think. As for the frame, that will be built the week we get back from spring break. I am still deciding whether to use Pygame or another program to create the projected images as I want to find one that will require the least computation.
Team Status Update for 2/29
This week we have all been hard at work on our individual tasks, but as a team we’ve been sifting through the feedback we were given on our project and have been looking for ways to incorporate it into our report. We have made progress on ordering materials and are looking forward to making a prototype for the frame next week.
One of the big takeaways from the design review is that we need to make real measurements of our current runtimes, which is something we’ve been struggling with since the Duvetyne fabric that will improve the tap-detection and provide a consistent background for the CV software has not yet arrived. We expect that when it arrives, hopefully this week, we will be able to make these measurements and assess our progress more quantitatively.
Aneek’s Status Update for 2/29
This week I gave the design review presentation for our team, so I mainly focused on practicing for that and refining the slides beforehand. I also thought more about the software architecture and created a full diagram of the library structure as well as the callable functions between them, so that we can divide up the tasks very easily into different components.
Post-presentation, I reviewed the feedback on our design and continued to build out the Tap detection software. The socket programming is almost complete, and the tap detection software is pretty much complete for testing – once the Duvetyne mat arrives, I will jump right into that and see what fine-tuning we can do to improve detection and lower latency.
Connor’s Status Update for 2/29
This week, I was mainly concerned with ordering parts. I decided we will order the PVC parts from F.W. Webb Company as we will need around 25 ft. of piping and they sold it in this size range. Mid-week we received some feedback from our design presentation. I decided to alter our frame design a bit based on that feedback. Originally, we were thinking of preventing the frame from toppling by adding weight to the front. However, it is not too difficult to add avoid tipping by lengthening the side bars. Next week, I would like to get a functioning prototype of the frame assembled.
Andrew’s Status Update for 2/29
This week we’ve all been hard at work on our report and reviewing the feedback we got from our presentation. I have been continuing to refine the thresholding for our piece segmentation as well as playing around with some feature extraction methods. Right now I am still running into trouble with background noise of the surface we are using, but that should theoretically be fixed by the time the new surface we will be using comes in. If not I’ve done some preliminary research on how to fix it, but they would likely require tuning for that specific surface and It is a problem that would make more sense facing when we know what our final surface will be.
Here is my use of ORB feature detection method, but as you can see by the red dots it is picking up a lot of the features from my laptop case.
Team Status Update for 2/22
This week we have all been working on bringing our product up to where we are hoping to be for our midsemester demo. So far we have run into a few issues with some of the technologies, but seems to be moving forward after some minor hiccups. For instance, the Leap Motion controller has difficulty detecting hands while the hands are close to a reflective surface. We are hoping to solve this by covering the work area with a light absorbing material. We will be purchasing and testing Duvetyne for this purpose. We are putting together our presentation, designing the physical frame, and creating the preliminary CV pipeline we will be using. We’ve placed some orders for parts and have been able to use some from the department. So far things seem like they’re on a good path.