Author: anushka2

This week was heavily design focus. I was responsible for giving the Design Review presentation, so I spent most of last weekend researching and getting the presentation together. It was very helpful doing this presentation because it helped show me what parts of the project we have more planned than others. For example, the “middleware” part of the project, i.e. the Jetson and the communication part, is where we have the most questions surrounding the specs and how/if it’ll fit in the final scope of our project. However, we have the most information on the sensors, which we have already ordered. I have a clearer understanding of the direction of our capstone and what areas I need to explore more.

Speaking of areas I need to learn more about, I continued tinkering with the Jetson this week. It’s still behaving very spottedly, and I predict it has something to do with how I downloaded the image on the SD card. As mentioned before, this is the weakest part of our project, so I need to spend more time on next week. My goal before Spring Break is to get it set up, collect data from the sensors, and send information to the web application. It’s a lot, but if I make this my sole focus, it’ll be good for the project as a whole after we come back.

We ordered individual sensors to test out while we wait for the PCB board to be manufactured. We began testing it and decided to create a visual interface of it. The idea that I had was that the yellow dots represent the sensors and the blue dot represents the objects that are being detected.

I originally wanted to create this web application in Django, so I told Edward to code the MQTT communication in Python. However, since the CSS of the “objects” need to be changed, and the only time it would update is when the server would refresh, we decided to change our web application to be all on the client side. I asked Edward to change the code into JavaScript, and then we were able to get an almost instantaneous rendering of the sensor data. A demo is attached to the link below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w0-5nBngHThfDe-A_Iem-NNt1k3NcuCe/view?usp=sharing

For the next week, I will focus on the Jetson and finishing the design review paper. If I have some time after these two, I will finetune our visualization so that it can be used as a dashboard to measure the latency and accuracy of the sensors. However, this may become a Spring Break or after Spring Break issue.

As mentioned before, the Jetson is the weakest part and the greatest risk. Although we have a contingency plan if the Jetson doesn’t work, I don’t see a reason why we have to remove it at the moment. I will reach out to my teammates and the professors on Monday so that we can get over this hump. We’re still pretty much on schedule, since we are getting a lot of work done before the actual sensors get shipped.

This week, my focus was on a myriad of tasks rather than focusing on a specific dimension. This was prompted by our earlier purvey into the hologram pyramids; even though we aren’t scheduled to work on it until much later, I wanted to look into web application interface and the Jetson communication.

With a quick look into the holograms last week, after discussions with the professor and the TA, we are considering making the hologram pyramid bigger so that there is more surface area. I had an idea of cutting square pieces of acrylic, decreasing the angles of the trapezoid, and testing.

Looking into the Pepper’s Ghost illusion, the original use of it was in magic show’s. The original projections are similar to the ones in the diagram shown below. That projection is horizontal, and there is only one glass available. I may brainstorm ideas on how to execute this, since most people have access to projectors and can easily replicate this instead of needing to use a big screen and a pyramid.

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Image from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost#/media/File:Peppers_ghost_low_angle.jpg

I also began looking into Jetson. Setting it up is similar to setting a Raspberry Pi, but I was having some trouble formatting the SD card. I also began researching different communication protocols, including MQTT. I want to follow this tutorial once I set up the Jetson to see if we can use it in our final project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPmzoYwXj00&ab_channel=AshutoshMohanty.

Image of Jetson

We have a design presentation due next week, and I volunteered to present this time. I want to focus on making our presentation more pitch-focused, so I began storyboarding how I imagine the user will be using it. Some screenshots are below. For the presentation, I also worked on a few slides on the wrist watch CAD file and the gesture algorithm, which can be seen under the Design Review tab above.

Screenshots of the user experience

Since we are moving around the different parts of the schedule, I don’t believe I am behind. If anything, starting on these parts means that we are ahead, but I have to continue working on them in order to continue to hold this position. Over the next week, I want to do more work on the Jetson, since this will be the most relevant once the sensors are completed. Since we ordered some sensors to test with, we can start with communication at the end of next week with the Jetson, so I’ll make that my deadline.

This week was our first week working directly on the project. We spent the first half preparing for our proposal presentation. We discussed bringing in a hologram component into our project to fulfill our use case further in providing a novel experience to interact with 3D models. I contributed information on the slides related to this new addition and began coming up with requirements for this component. One of my main goals this week was to improve our explanation of our use cases; our TA gave good advice on thinking of our proposal as a business pitch, so I wanted to incorporate as many applications of our project in the presentation.

Going further on this, I began researching hologram pyramids. They are easy to create from everyday plastic items, but we decided to look into clear acrylic sheets in our first round of prototyping. I visited IDeATe and found a piece of acrylic, but by the time we wanted to use it, IDeATe was closed. I began by creating a model on SolidWorks and cutting it out as shown below.

Model of Initial Pyramid

Trial 1 Demo

However, this was a naive approach, as I didn’t consider any proportions of the sides or the angles involved. As a team, we found that the Pepper’s Ghost pyramid is a more accurate way to create the hologram, and I quickly remodeled and cut the plastic. Unfortunately, we still couldn’t achieve the desired outcome.

Trial 2 Demo

Even though the hologram becomes more relevant at the end of the project, it’s important that we start looking into it now. I wouldn’t say that I’m behind, but I do think that this does not require a lot of time and can be finished over the next two weeks. Over the next week, I hope to do more research into holographic illusions and see if there are either improvements or alternatives.