Team Status Report for 3/4/2023

As per usual in the weekly reports, we would say that our biggest risks at the moment pertain to the hardware. The most imminent risk is that we have yet to really dive into trying to set up the rPi (other than reading internet tutorials/projects). As none of us have used an rPi before, there is the chance that this will not go smoothly. Our plan to mitigate this risk is to begin working with the rPi early this week (i.e. trying to run tutorial code), and if we are unable to accomplish what we need with it by the end of the week, we will reach out to course staff. The other, broader hardware risk is that we will find an rPi’s computational abilities insufficient for our project. Again, the plan to mitigate this risk is to begin trying out our algorithms on the rPi sooner rather than later, hopefully starting the week after next (3/20). If we find that it runs infeasibly slow on the rPi, our contingency plan is use a Jetson Nano.

At the moment, no major changes have been made to the existing design. We are considering acquiring a more secure domain for our web app, which would cost around $15, but otherwise shouldn’t affect the implementation or functionality of the project.

Our schedule has not changed at this time.

In terms of tools that we will need to learn for our project, nothing super new or unexpected has cropped up beyond what we’ve been assuming since the beginning of the project. We will all need to learn how to work with the rPi, including how to set up an Apache server to communicate with our web app. Rebecca will be learning how to work with OpenCV beyond what she’s previously done for classes, Max will be learning about working with Inception-v4, and Brandon will be learning more about Django and React.

Rebecca’s Status Report for 3/4/2023

The week before spring break, pretty much all of the time (and energy) I had allotted for capstone went into the design review report. Other than playing around with the different built-in tracking algorithms a bit more, I did not work directly on the project. In the time since, over break, I have done some research into the concept of motion detection with OpenCV, and found several relevant projects that I intend to use as references. I also found more resources regarding running OpenCV on a Raspberry Pi specifically that I hope will be useful to get that up and running.

Per our schedule, I would say that my progress at this point is slightly behind. In an ideal world I would have started trying to work with the rPi over break, but I simply did not have the energy. The only tasks that I am ‘behind’ on at this point are beginning to learn the set-up of an rPi – basic ‘hello world’ type of stuff and getting tutorial code to run without alteration. To get back on track, I intend to begin working with the rPi early this coming week. If I am unable to get it running reasonably well by Wednesday, I will involve my group mates for aid (we can talk about it during mandatory lab time on Wednesday morning). And if we’re still struggling by Thursday or Friday, I will reach out to course staff, probably Kaashvi. So long as we can begin trying to get our code to run on the rPi by the end of the week, we will be on track.

In the next few days,  I need to start trying to set up the Raspberry Pi. In particular, I will be looking to successfully run some sort of tutorial code by Wednesday. I also aim to get a working ‘rough draft’ of the motion detection + tracking by the end of the week, as per the schedule. I feel I have a good grasp on what tracking and motion detection in OpenCV look like separately, so I believe it should be quite doable to combine these pieces with a few hours of work. I hope to start to get this code (tracking + detection) working on the rPi by the end of the week.