Our biggest risk, unable to set up the MIPI camera, from last week is resolved by switching to a usb camera. After some cross debugging, we decided to use an external usb camera instead. After the switch on Sunday, we have been able to take pictures and run YOLO inference on those pictures in real time. Our software progress with respect to integrating camera capture and triggering detect.py (inference) has been pretty smooth and we are almost caught up with the schedule. With most of the mechanical parts here, we are able to do some physical measurements to determine the height and angle that the camera should be placed. The mechanical building is now our biggest risk, as despite our rigorous planning there are some issues that could occur during implementation, which will force us to tweak our design as we go.
One example of such a situation was seen this past week, after the acrylic piece arrived. After comparing this to the plywood in techspark and the wood pieces the professor provided us with, we decided to go with the acrylic as it was more fitting in terms of size and thickness for our bin. To reduce the amount of risk, we will be testing on scrap pieces before cutting into our acrylic piece, and if something still goes wrong in this process, our backup plan will be to glue the plywood pieces in techspark to make it thicker and go with that.
Updated Design:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wiW573DBv5wk_PY8Wq1K_Vxar4fNopX1/view?usp=sharing
As of now, since the materials from our original order will be used, we do not have any additional costs except for the axle, shaft coupler, and clamps mentioned in previous updates. A big thanks to the professor for giving us some extra materials for our frame!
In terms of design, switching to a usb camera did not change other components involved.
We talked to Techspark workers, and they said it would be possible to CAD up the design for us if we gave them a rough sketch, and they could also help us cut using the laser cutters. Next week, we will work with them to start CADing up the swinging lid design.
Here is a picture of our new camera running the detection program. Next week we’ll have to fine tune the model some more, since here this is obviously not a glass bottle.
For the demo we will show the hardware components (servos, lights, speaker) as well as the webcam classification from a sample bottle .