This week we had an unfortunate incident where the battery overheated and fried our vertical motor. We had to rush order a new one, and we’re planning to cope with this to get it set up as best as we can in time for our user study in the second half of this week. If something goes wrong with getting the replacement, our contingency plan is to just default to the horizontal motor and try to set up our apparatus in such a way that the projector is in line with an average user’s height.
We aren’t going to be making any large changes to the system at this point, we’ve just been coming up with ways to make our program more robust (ex. averaging the user’s angle during the pairing process to soften if we get one bad reading, etc.). Again, we are planning as a team to get some people to test our system as a user study, as soon as we can (hopefully) get the new vertical motor set up.
We’ve got the full setup on the tripod, and just need to find a way to attach our various circuits (lidar, arduino) onto the tripod to make it more portable. The lidar circuit is also now built and confirmed that it works properly in communication with the arduino.
Team Status Report for 3/26
This week, we were able to finish out some of the last pieces we need for an end-to-end pipeline. The circuit for out motor-to-arduino connection was completed, the calibration translation serial port was rewritten and debugged, and our computer vision pipeline now has a non-camera display version and a locking feature in progress. Once our members can join together on Monday, we should be able to put together our parts and begin debugging the entire pipeline, with the goal of presenting it on Wednesday.
The largest change was to the internal design of the calibration system. Now instead of sending data over the serial port one at a time, the byte stream for user pitch and yaw will be sent in one string, and then parsed by the arduino. This design involves more complex code on the arduino side, but makes our system more efficient and less error-prone.
The biggest risk currently is there may be unmitigated problems in our system that might pop up as we are putting together the pipeline on Monday, but our team is expecting this and we can each set aside time to debug the different problems that may arise. Once we can get through this process, we can begin gathering users for usability testing! Additionally we are still waiting for our camera and lidar to arrive, the camera delivery had an issue where the camera wasn’t in the package, so we need to wait a little more before integrating these tools. Luckily we don’t need them to debug our full system, so it doesn’t put us behind schedule, but we may need to put in some extra hours once those tools come in to learn how to read the data and input it into our program.