Isabel’s Status Report for 3/19

This week was fairly productive, as we are beginning to build our full pipeline, with the goal of finishing it out next week. Most of my hours went towards designing a state machine for the arduino program, which will need to switch through different parts of code for the different calibration phases (user height, then left and right measurements). For these phases, I’m using while loops with a timeout mechanism, as in, once the user stops moving the projector around for one calibration phase, it will automatically lock in and switch to the next phase. During each phase, the user will move the projector around with their head, which will signal the motor to move at a flat rate in the direction the user is facing. This mechanism may be redesigned in the future for usability, but for our preliminary tests it should work to be streamlined with the current computer vision. I’ve been commenting ‘//TUNE’ next to constants we may be able to tune once we begin testing our code. I also ordered our lidar and did some research on how I will hook it up once it comes in.
Currently I am right on schedule with the calibration, as long as I continue at this pace to finish the first draft of calibration code within the next week. I’m aiming to at least get a usable version by Wednesday. The main challenge for this isn’t writing the code, since I’ve already designed this, but currently I’m struggling to debug the Serial port since it doesn’t seem to be reading back the angles that we’re writing over it. If I’m still stuck on that feature on Monday, I might ask a TA that’s used pySerial if they have any input on why it doesn’t seem to be working. I am slightly behind schedule for the lidar because it might take a while to come in, but my mitigation for this would be manually setting the wall distance for now.
My main deliverables for next week will be: the calibration program, and some communication designs for my teammates since we’ll all be working very closely with this calibration code in the future.