Look who's talking!
This week was finalizing everything and filming the video! Finalizing everything mainly involved making the overall control loop and connecting it to the animation, as though it was connected to an actual device/motors in this case. We had created all of the separate pieces in …
This week we finished all of the independent part of our projects, tested it, and worked on getting everything working to the requirements we had set for ourselves (like accuracy for the classifier, sound, …). Our classifier was working at 95% accuracy for the 2 …
We finished our classifier this week (it works!!!) and tested it on the pi with the pi camera. We realized a lot of little things, like how much better the classifier works with a bright light on the person compared to a dim light. I also set up the microphones and made baffles (worked really well!!) and played with the frequencies so that we got it to process sound pretty quickly. I’ve been working on a little bit of everything, since at this stage most things require testing and I have all of the hardware. Now we mostly just have to finish the animation and integrate everything.
We started making a plan to film our demo video, and I think we’ll be able to show it pretty well through video. This weekend is mostly all of us working together and finishing up our final presentation for this week.
I have been playing with the microphones this week. Turns out that macOS Catalina doesn’t support Audacity, and then I tried to connect to an old laptop but the USB ports were broken, and had some other adaptor issues… also it’s super unclear if the …
This week was productive – as usual, everything took longer than expected, but we have been making significant progress. Neeti and Gauri spent a lot of time this week on our gesture classifier. We realized that it’s more difficult to recognize gestures with the same …
Minor issues for manual mode so it took longer than expected, but still making significant progress.
This week we decided to switch to just using pygame because it was much simpler to integrate, I already knew how to use it, and Matlab was causing a lot of issues. The pygame animation doesn’t look super aesthetic right now, but it’s functional and I plan to make it visually better later, when our sensors and other features are working.
We have made several changes to our gesture classifier but it is working (mostly), and we’re working on collecting a better dataset of gesture images now from our friends and families. More on this in our team update.
Since I have all of the hardware, for the past 2 days I have been working on setting up the pis on my home network, and getting them set up with the camera. We are able to capture video using the pi/pi camera, and now we just need to connect and feed those images to our neural net.
I just started connecting the microphones – TBD on how that works..
This week we made a lot of progress on our manual mode – hopefully enough to have it semi-working by demo Wednesday! Neeti has been working on the neural net classifier for the hand gesture (thumbs up and thumbs down). She realized earlier this week …
This week we made a lot of progress on manual mode – Neeti was working on the gesture classifier and training the models, and I worked on creating the simulation and figuring out how we can hook it up to output from the sensors. Matlab …
We restructured last week, and this week we started working virtually on different parts of our project. It’s nice that most of our parts shipped really quickly, so I think we already have everything that we will need for the rest semester (hopefully).
This week I started working on the animation portion of our project. We’re planning to use the same sensors and input we were originally going to use, and then sending that output to a simulation instead of to the physical device/motor. I started playing with Matlab/Simulink and the 3d World Editor associated with it. It doesn’t have a great interface, so it’s taking a lot of getting used to but based on the tutorials I’ve been going through it’s extremely powerful and should be capable of doing what we want to do.
Neeti and Gauri are working on the gesture classifier and it seems to be going well. We’re hoping to be able to have manual mode at least sort of working by the next demo, and begin playing with the audio/microphones in the next 2 weeks.
This week was our first week of virtual meetings. Definitely an adjustment, but I think we have a solid plan going forward. We’re definitely rushed for time since we lost a few weeks with restructuring project virtually and waiting for our parts to ship, but …