Devank’s Status Report for April 8th

This week I worked further on the shot calculation system, the frame design, and integration with Jimmy and Justin.

For the shot calculation, I mostly did 2 two things. The first of these was to account for the distance of the cue ball to the target ball while making a shot. Until now I was accounting for the angle deviation and the distance of the target ball from the pocket. I realized that the distance to the cue ball from the pocket ball also plays a role in this as the lesser the distance between the cue ball and the target ball, the lesser the difference in distance each angle will make. I need to further optimize this metric as right now my thresholding values might give inaccurate results in some cases. The second piece of correction of the ghost ball. I was doing it incorrectly the first time and found during testing that this required a redesign of that module.

For the frame, I added a third leg which would act as a pillar to hold the projector. This would be slightly taller than the other two legs as the projector needs to be held up at a higher distance than we originally thought since we decided to use a different projector with a different throw ratio. I added support beams joining the three legs in place and now need to work on making the projector mounting mechanism more secure. We also added LED strips to produce stable artificial lighting as we realized that the CV system was really sensitive to external lighting conditions.

For integration, I worked with Jimmy to smoothen out a few bugs that came up in shot detection. With Justin we talked about how I would read the data he is sending me from the sensors so we can display post shot feedback back onto the table for the user to see.

My work for the next few weeks is pretty clear cut. I need to finish integrating the 3 sub-systems with my teammates, need to find a way to hold the projector steady and need to add another Arduino to the frame. The main purpose of this Arduino would be to control a servo that would move a piece of wood covering the projector lens back and forth so that the CV system does not catch the projected balls and think of them as real balls. This should not be too hard and will be done in the next week.