Form-Factor and Part Design
The design of InFrame’s enclosure will play a key role in the appeal of the finalized product. A fair bit of the discussions that we had this week revolved around the form-factor that we wanted InFrame to take.
Due to InFrame’s 2 degrees of freedom and the hemispherical nature of the camera movement, we’re planning on having the camera system on a rotating disk. On this disk, we will have fixtures that will hold the camera itself (along with any microphones and status indicator lights). On one of these fixtures and on the rotating disk, we will have servo motors (as shown in the mock-up above) to point the camera anywhere along the hemisphere. Now, the camera that we will use for tracking will have a high enough resolution to produce quality output, but is unlikely to support very high frame rates. Because a user may want to track highly dynamic subjects, we will have an additional camera mount on top of our system’s camera so that something like a GoPro or a smartphone may be mounted (using a standard tripod screw) and used in addition to our system camera.
Inside of the enclosure, we will have a slot for the removable battery and the Jetson, which will be processing the feed from the camera and communicating with the iOS companion app.
One of the challenging things that we still need to determine is whether we will use a slip ring for the camera’s ribbon cable so that we can have endless 360 degree panning without tangling the cable or if we will set software limits so that the camera can only go so far until it resets from the opposite side (similar to what we would do with our heads when following someone behind us).
Moving Forwards
This week, the form factor should start to look finalized, with Thor starting to CAD up some of these parts and bringing InFrame slowly to life. I’ll mainly start to work with Ike to design the iOS and Jetson software and define how the different software components will interact with each other. By the end of next week, we should have some pretty sweet object and interaction diagrams that will give a pretty good overview of how software components will tie in together, so stay tuned 🙂
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