This week, I designed a camera mount to get our fixed angle viewing point and I laser cut that as well as the final control tower. We had planned to make the control tower out of black acrylic for aesthetics and water-tightness, but unfortunately Tech Spark was all out of laser cutting material except for chipboard. Due to our tight timeline I decided to use the less ideal material and paint it black, even though it will not be as water resistant as we had hoped.
On Thursday, I gathered footage for evaluating the CV algorithm’s accuracy on individual ingredients and strainers. Since we don’t have the full hardware setup yet, we will likely do another evaluation after the strainer mechanisms are properly positioned around the pot. Additionally, I added masking for each strainer based on their raised starting positions that toggle based on strainer state (ready or not), in order to only have the CV examine relevant parts of each frame. I also wrote code for serial communications between the Nano and our two Arduinos, but I suspect that we will run into a lot of timing nuances to work out in the coming week. Schedule-wise, I’m behind where I would want to be for the last week of classes, but I think our team will be able to mostly integrate our subsystems by the end of the course.