This week all of the parts arrived which allowed me to start testing the drivers for the motors and cameras as well as testing the batteries. I soldered the motor shield pins and got a proof of concept for all motors working. I also was able to get images from the Pi camera and output them to a jpeg file.
I also got UART communication between the Pi and Arduino working which will allow us to send commands to control the motors from the Pi.
All code I worked on this week is included in the UNOmatic repo that Jason shared last week.
Lastly, I tested the batteries and the voltage converter. We proved that we were able to power the motors from the 12v battery and get 5v for powering the raspberry Pi from the 12v battery as well. We also powered on the Arduino using the 9v rechargeable batteries.
I am currently on schedule. Next week, I want to get started in assisting Jason with collecting image data for the card classifier. We will have to decide on an image size and format. The picamera library provides support for outputting images as numpy arrays so that will be our first try. I also will work with Thomas to tune the motor parameters to get smooth rotation and card dealing.