Accomplishments This Week
Firstly, I worked on the Design Review Presentation that we have next week. Other than the presentation, I worked on configuring the webcam that will be used to detect expiration dates for the scanner module. I first tried configuring with a given camera that we got from storage, however noticed that webcams generally didn’t have an auto focus/zoom mode. This led to lower quality images at close range (<10cm). This realization allowed me to make sure that our camera had good compatibility with close range shots. Then with our newly arrived camera, I have successfully connected the camera to the Rbpi.
Project Schedule and Progress
My progress is on schedule, have done preliminary hardware/software planning and implementation in preparation for next week.
Goals for the Next Week
Next week my goal will be to test the camera with the other hardware components such as the barcode scanner. We would want to scan both barcode and exp. date at the same time, where the trigger of the barcode scanner will be the shared control signal. After configuring them to operate simultaneously, I will research the OCR algorithm for basic implementation, disregarding any confidence score/accuracy requirement.