Accomplished Tasks
These weeks were the weeks of Carnival and putting things together. Over the last two weeks, I worked on putting all our separate components together, both in hardware and in software. I first worked with the team to put together the hardware; this meant designing the wiring schematic to figure out which wires would be connected where, and linking together the rover, the PTZ motor (and camera), and the laser. I added a breadboard to help unify the wires, and also labelled the length of the wires (to determine which should be longer than others. Fortunately, the hardware unification was a success! All the components worked after combining them all, which was amazing as now the whole rover was functional with all the pieces on it. Several wood structures were laser cut to help provide structure and stability to the rover’s components.
On the software end, I had to combine all the software code together. This comprised of unifying 4 disjoint files for the laser, moving, camera streaming, and PTZ moving into one big file. The moving code was also created to properly take in inputs from the CV side and points towards the targeted person as was initially planned. All the code unification worked as well, as the rover was now able to concurrently (using threads) stream, move, and point lasers, as well as read inputs from the CV side. Unfortunately, I have not resolved the issue of making the rover be able to do the same things twice, causing changes that still need to be done for the search pattern.
In regards to new tools and new knowledge, I had to learn a lot for this project from all sorts of places. I was unfamiliar with Raspberry Pi’s, UART communication, and all the sorts of libraries needed for the code. To learn these, I had to read an extensive amount of documentation online, along with observing examples of what people did on forums. Typically reading documentation provided the bulk of the understanding, while forum posts helped guide alongside. I also asked help from my TA Aden, who helped greatly in providing some invaluable guidance, advice, and assistance throughout the whole process.
Progress
My progress is on track, with the full end-to-end rover now put together. Now it comes down to tuning the rover to perform as accurately as we had planned for it to do. This will involve many tests and small adjustments, but with the main infrastructure there, it should be doable. There can also be some work in “pretty-ifying” the work as well.
Next Week’s Deliverables
Next week, I plan to have the rover fully functional *and* accurate, as well as present the Final Presentation. This means making sure that the rover is able to perform the given task of finding the person, and pointing at them with the laser with an acceptable accuracy. This is mostly fine-tuning, but is still critical nonetheless.