This week, I’ve been mainly working with the entire team with debugging and improving the overall system. On Monday, I tested 3 different software serial programs to integrate the lidar values. I ended up going with SoftwareSerial even though it’s a blocking program, because it worked the most consistently with verifying the data from the lidar, so I found a way to quarantine the distance detection into the arduino’s setup code.
After Monday, the biggest two changes I implemented were one for smoothing the horizontal movement of the projector, and optimizing the pipeline. And the movement of the projector now runs noticeably smoother and faster! Which is good, because we have been finding lots of new bugs to work through during the user tests.
With the lidar integrated, now I am back on schedule. We anticipated that the last few weeks would be for our whole team to work on refinement, so everything I’ve been doing is falling into that category.
For this next week, I need to redo the block diagrams for our system, prepare for the presentation on Monday, smooth the vertical movement of the projector, and I hope to make another small redesign of the calibration program to make it much easier on the user, since we’ve been noticing from our tests that it can be difficult to move around the projector to two different angles, and then look at them correctly. Our calibration code is picky and very sensitive to error, so I want to make it as robust as possible before the demo.