Accomplished Tasks
This week was a week of good progress… towards the latter half. I immediately started the week with burning my Raspberry Pi that I was working on. This was because while attempting to hook the RPi up with the rover, I did not realize that the rover shell was metallic. As a result, it shorted the RPi’s bottom, and burned the SD card (and myself). Fortunately, this was good insight for the future, as when we fully assemble the rover, I will remember to be more cautious about parts on the rover. I had to obtain a new RPi, and re-set it all up to be used again. I also obtained the new batteries, and they successfully fit inside the rover, allowing for the rover bottom to be closed appropriately. Slowly the rover is coming together. The JSON commands are still to be sorted out, as it took a while to find the correct port for the RPi to be read from.
On a more important point, working together with my team, we managed to get the camera to work! The camera can now be controlled with the PTZ motor, and the camera feed is displayed. It turned out to be a hardware issue all along, and we are investigating if we should switch to a different camera, but maintain the PTZ portion.
Progress
My progress is still somewhat on track, though I absolutely need to work on the rover JSON commands, which I fortunately can focus on now that the camera data is set up properly. I also need to discuss with how the CV servers will be sending the appropriate movement controls.
Next Week’s Deliverables
Next week, for the interim demo, I plan to have the rover be successfully controlled using programming; in other words, sort out the exact JSON commands needed to move the rover. I also plan on making the interfacing with instruction controls to be as straightforward as possible, so that when the CV part is linked up, it is as painless as possible. While this is still similar to last week’s goals, it mostly stems from being diverted to helping with the camera and being stalled by the RPI burning. The end-to-end version of the rover is a strong goal to work for towards the interim demo.