This week was also fairly productive. While I thought I was facing a single issue with the serial port last week when creating the calibration pipeline, in fact I was facing a set of issues. When I got the serial port running, the bytes that came back would be slightly out of order, or seemed randomly to be either what I was expecting or some disorganized mishmash of the codes I was using to signify ‘right’ (720).
I decided to debug it more closely using by a test file ‘py_connectorcode.py’. I researched more on the serial port bugs and read through arduino forums, and found this useful resource https://forum.arduino.cc/t/serial-input-basics/278284/2 about creating a non-blocking function with start and end markers to prevent the data from overwriting itself. The non-blocking element is important so that our functions that are writing angles to the motor don’t stop while waiting for the serial port to finish. I also decided to remake my design to send only one pre-compiled message per round (for yaw and pitch of the person), and then print only one line back from the arduino, to clean up the messages.
The calibration code is complete, but still needs to be synthesized with the motor code before we can test it. Currently our team plan is to put together the pieces on Monday, so I’ll have this code in the head_connector.py file by the end of Sunday. Then next week I hope to help the rest of the team with debugging the code, specifically for translation, before coming up with ideas and most likely debugging the initial calibration process. Currently I am on schedule with the calibration process, but slightly behind with Lidar, since I was planning to integrate it this week but couldn’t due to it not having arrived yet. I’ve already researched a tutorial on how to put it together, so once it arrives I have a plan to put it together, and can make extra time in the lab to get that circuit out.