Carnegie Mellon University ECE Capstone, Spring 2023: Jeff Chen, Elizabeth Chuei, Dianne Ge
Personal Progress
This week we worked on setting up the system for the demo (with the frame and the artificial lights) as well as adding some features for the user, such as stopping in the middle of a movement if a person leaves the LAOE and readjusting accordingly.
Next Steps
We will need to fine tune a bit more with the setup for the demo (the artificial lights), and focus on working on the final document, poster, and video.
Risk and Risk Management
The biggest risk to our project right now is not finishing the final document. Our mitigation plan is to start early.
System Design Changes
As of now there hasn’t been a change to the existing design of the system.
Schedule
The schedule has not changed and everyone is on schedule.
Comprehensive Testing
Some changes made based on the findings were some more leniency for the LAOE intersection, fine tuning the user position detection, and changing the speeds of the motor.
Personal Progress
This week we worked on the final presentation as well as preparing for the final demo. We have planned out what we will be doing and working on the physical as well as technical setup, such as the frame and what the different light source location examples we will be showing will be.
We are currently on track.
Next Steps
Next week, we hope to finish implementing the things we need for our demo (physical setup, hardcoded sun location examples, etc) and prepare the final report and video and other materials.
Personal Progress
This week I worked on fine tuning the LAOE portion of the algorithm and creating more rigorous testing. This should help ensure that edge cases where a person is on or near the boundary of being in the LAOE will be treated as an “in LAOE” case to be safe, as well as adding a few more test cases. This will need to be tested on one of the sunny days coming up. The changes I made can be seen on our repository as usual: https://github.com/djge/18500_GroupC1
I also worked briefly with Elizabeth on setting up the RPi on Wednesday.
We are currently on track, and I hope to run some more integrated testing with a real person in sunlight to ensure that the adjustments I made will work in a real setting.
Comprehensive Testing Update
I have already run tests measuring the difference between data and measured projection points from the window onto the floor (this determines the “area of effect”). There are 7 total test cases (4 points for each), giving a total of 28 test cases. We may continue to measure data on sunny days for this, but our focus going forwards will be on integration testing with a real life scenario of a person in and out of the LAOE, as well as testing whether or not the change in blinds mitigates the effects of sunlight.
Next Steps
Next week, we hope to run more testing in real situation testing, as it should be sunny. We also hope to finish and set up a way to present the blinds so they are more visually appealing and come up with adjustments that will make it more user-friendly.
Personal Progress
This week I worked on both testing and integration with my teammates. Since Wednesday was a sunny day, we did some testing on the User Position Extraction algorithm. We were able to figure out some issues with it and some changes, such as adding the height of the stand of the LIDAR camera. We also did some testing with the LAOE algorithm. One was the projection coordinates function, where we map coordinates of the corners of the windows onto where the light is cast onto the floor. We kept having strange values for the y-value of the top left and top right coordinates, but we eventually realized that this was because there was the ledge of the roof outside and above the window that was blocking off the top portion of the window from direct light. After accounting for the length of this ledge, the algorithm works great with relatively low error (~4% error). We also manually tested the intersection algorithm, which uses both user position and projection coordinates. This also worked relatively well enough for our initial standards.
We are currently on track. We are working on getting a construct to attach the blinds, but all testing besides integration testing is done.
Next Steps
Next week, we hope to finished with the MVP and fine tune the accuracy of the algorithms.
Risk and Risk Management
The major risk that we have is the physical installation of the blinds. The blinds need to be drilled into a window, but we cannot legally drill the blinds into the windows of any of our houses. Our current workaround for this is to connect the blinds to a cardboard construct and attach that construct to the windows, or wherever we want to put them. We also need command strips in order to connect the cardboard to the window, but if these do not arrive on time then we will temporarily use duct tape.
System Design Changes
As of now there hasn’t been a change to the existing design of the system.
Schedule
The schedule has not changed yet, and everyone is roughly on track for the time being.
Personal Progress
This week I worked on both testing and integration with my teammates.
With Elizabeth, we worked on the integration of the main file that would continuously be running face detection and doing calculations if a face is found. I also wrote a testing file that would make sure the projection coordinates are correct, as this is the most important part for accuracy reasons. There are a few issues right now (I might have gotten the axis or angle mixed up relative to North, as the sign of the x-value is flipped). The full scope of the work can be found in our repository: https://github.com/djge/18500_GroupC1.
Jeff and I discussed potential ways to integrate the motor system with the adjustment of the blinds, but have yet to integrate as we first need to calibrate the turning of the blinds with the blind size to figure out how we can get the blinds to go up or down a certain amount. We are currently on track.
Next Steps
Next week, we hope to have an integrated system, where we can start to debug as well as fine tune parts of the project that are not performing as well as they should be. Additionally, I will work on the issues with the algorithm and writes tests for the intersect function as well.
Personal Progress
This week I finished the LAOE implementation. Since I already finished the projection coordinates function, what I worked on implementing was the intersection between a user and the light area of effect and the necessary change to the blinds in the case that a user is in the LAOE. The full scope of the update can be seen in this commit: https://github.com/djge/18500_GroupC1/commit/69665b1dfaf08be004fe2e29e75437b43dc36aa9
I also wrote up some pseudocode for a main function that takes these inputs and sends them to the correct functions in the right steps to get the necessary change to the blinds.
Next Steps
Next week, I hope to get some working integration. I also want to set up test cases to fix the accuracy of the LAOE projected coordinates, but we will be focusing on integration first. This will be both software and hardware integration, such as testing the change in blinds with a command from a blinds change function.
Risks and Risk Management
After we received the D455 LIDAR camera, our most significant risk as of now is probably how our LAOE testing is dependent on not only our schedules, but the weather as well, as we can only test on sunny days. To combat this, we want to collect as much data as possible early on. So far, we have a few data points from sunny days previously in the semester, but we want to continue to collect as much as possible during varying times of day.
System Design Changes
There are no system design changes this week.
Schedule
The schedule has not changed, and everything on both the software side and hardware side are on track.
Teamwork Adjustments
No adjustments have been made as of now, as everyone is roughly still on schedule. All team members have been meeting up with each other throughout the week, and there are no new design challenges yet.
New Tools
With our finished Design Report, we have no new tools to learn besides the ones we had already planned on learning.
Progress
This week, I worked primarily on the Design Report. I focused on sections in design relating to the LAOE algorithm, such as illustrating and describing how the algorithm works in implementation, trade studies with figuring out the AOE with hardware, and the tests we plan to conduct in regards to LAOE. I also worked on the use case requirements and the architecture and principles of operation sections.
Schedule
So far, I am on schedule. This week is part of the algorithm implementation, which was started last week and is mostly complete except for some parts of the intersection detection and blinds change calculation.
Next Steps
Going forwards, I will finish up the LAOE algorithm and start setting up test cases so we can make sure everything is working correctly and make the necessary adjustments as soon as possible.