This week, we had a meeting with our professor and a separate one with our TA to go over some of the design features of our project to ensure that we are prepared for the design review presentations coming up next week. We discussed how we can provide greater detail to our system’s block diagram to better show how our sensor array will be interfacing with the Jetson Nano. We also narrowed down the design of the of the sliding mechanism, and discussed how our sensors would interact with our image classifier.
As of now, our biggest risks still seem to be meeting our desired overall latency and ensuring that our sensor array is able to pick up meaningful readings from objects placed in our bin. Concerning the latency issue, we have narrowed down our mechanism design preference to two options: 1) using a gear attached to the platform to move it and 2) using a belt system to slide the platform. We are looking for more feedback on which may be quicker and more reliable to help improve our latency and reliability. As for the sensors, we are planning to purchase multiple of the same sensors and spread them out under the platform so that a greater area is covered by the sensors to hopefully get more accurate readings. We will begin the testing of our sensors shortly so we will have a much better idea of exactly where each sensor should be placed in the next few weeks.
One change to our design that we made recently was that we eventually plan on buying more of the same sensors and spreading them out across the holding platform. While this will increase our costs slightly, none of our sensors are extremely expensive and we feel that the potential added accuracy of having a more spread out sensor array is worth the extra cost.
Our project is behind. We have received our first round of sensors in the mail and will begin testing shortly. Our mechanism still hasn’t been finalized. Next week, we will have our design review presentation and will hopefully be able to order some more components to our project as well, after we finalize the mechanism.