This week, I focused on the ethics assignment, reformatting the entire physics model to fit our new code format, and started integrating our entire code pipeline. Most of the week was spent revamping our code, making sure that we all conformed to our specific code format. Although this seemed like busy work, it was a huge step for us as it will go a long way in ensuring a more seamless integration process when we combine our codes together.
In my previous team status report, I talked about devising a software API framework for us to conform to. It turned out to be a pretty good framework for us over the past week, as we moved all our current implementations to follow this framework. The biggest learning point for me is that if we had done this earlier, we would’ve saved a lot of time and trouble revamping our entire codebase. This is an extremely important takeaway for me as I go on to become a full-fledged engineer in the future. With that said, a good portion of the week was spent moving over my originally implemented subsystem to follow our new format. I have tested the framework with a single image, and it is working fine.
This also led to my first steps toward integrating our code. Using the output from Debrina’s Computer Vision model, I was able to parse the images from the model and put it through the physics model, which would return an output_line to project. Tomorrow, our team will meet together to try to integrate this on a real video feed. We will most likely face a few issues in alignment and integration, but we will try our best to resolve any issues that arise tomorrow.
Another big part of this week’s progress was the ethics assignment. I did not expect to spend so much time on this assignment, but I ended up spending around 5-6 hours on this ethics assignment. I particularly found doing research on global ethical issues and how technology intertwined with politics pretty interesting. Furthermore, it was also pretty difficult to think of ethical issues that could arise with our eight-ball pool project, thus, it also took a lot of time really trying to reflect and understand our project on a deeper level in order to consider the global, cultural, and social implications that our project could encompass. As we write code to make our project successful, this assignment was quintessential in ensuring that we do not forget the importance of engineering ethics in any project. When we do our meeting tomorrow, our team will begin to discuss Step 3 of the ethics assignment as well.
We are a few days behind schedule for whatever we wanted to accomplish. Initially, we wanted to start the integration efforts on friday. However, we felt that we were not ready to integrate our assigned parts. Thus, we decided to just convert our Friday meeting to a work session, and push back the integration process to tomorrow instead. Our team members feel more ready to continue with the integration tomorrow, and thus, we are excited to get our first taste of integrating all our subsystems together tomorrow.