For the past 2 weeks I prototyped and finished making the launching subsystem. It was very rewarding to finally be able to shoot a ping pong ball out of the cannon (even though at the beginning it was going at a very high speed). I don’t really see many possible issues with our final bit of integration, something I was worried about at one point was how difficult it would be to move the pipe around, but after talking with Simon I am confident it won’t be an issue.
No major design changes this week. It is however, worth noting that we ended up only needing a thicker tube to fire the ping pong ball, so the problem we had firing the ping pong ball was indeed due to the resistance of the tube.
I also finished the cup detection. I take several 3d coordinate pictures (with the LIDAR), project these onto the plane that is perpendicular to gravity and then convolve a circle onto that image to get out the cup locations. Visually this works very well but I am having trouble extracting the precise cup location and will be finishing that up later tonight.
I’ve worked a bit on collecting data for ball detection and cup detection and am going to continue doing that next week. Next week I also plan on collecting data for the launching subsystem.
I had to learn a lot of stuff about piping and air pressure for this capstone project and I found a lot of useful websites explaining how to do projects that are similar to ours. But ultimately, I found a blog post explaining pressure and flow in terms of voltage and current and that proved to be very intuitive for me. I also learned a lot through trial and error of different computer vision algorithms for cup and ball detection. Something else I learned was how to apply my mathematical skills to write code that necessitates it (the ball dynamics and cup projection were especially enjoyable for me to finish).
No schedule changes this week and we will be focused on testing and integration for the rest of the semester.
