This was a productive week for me, as I was able to catch up on the things that I was a bit behind on. The biggest accomplishment of the week was completing the PCB layout. There are a couple of silkscreen labels that I want to make minor adjustments to, but the actual placement of the components, pads, tracks, and edges should not need to change. Here is the schematic view of the layout:

And here are a few angles of the 3D render produced by KiCad:

In the above screenshots, the pink side is the front of the PCB and the green side is the back. Also, there are only 4 LEDs rendered instead of all 12 because I had used the footprint and corresponding 3D model of a single LED to create a custom footprint that encompassed all 3 LEDs for each side of the intersection. I do not know how to change the 3D model to reflect the fact that my custom footprint actually has 3 LEDs, and I didn’t think it was worth spending time on figuring that out since it doesn’t affect the actual PCB at all. Anyways, I will make the aforementioned silkscreen layer changes on Monday and get the PCB ordered by the end of class.

There were a couple other miscellaneous tasks I accomplished this week. I ordered the LED drivers and Arduino stacking headers necessary to complete our PCB. These parts should arrive within the next few days. I also finally got around to taking videos at Fifth and Craig that Ankita can use to train the object detection model. I will be helping her to isolate screenshots from the footage and run code that adds a bounding box for the desired objects (cars, buses, trucks, etc.). I also began writing some parts of the Arduino code to drive the LED intersection. Most of what I have right now is focused on translating the data that will come in from the RPi into information that is usable by the Arduino. The next big step is to write the function that parses this input and generates the proper output to the LED driver so that the proper LEDs turn on for the specified amount of time.

This week we were still in a very preliminary phase of researching/purchasing/planning before we can begin work on our implementation. We settled on the IP camera to order, ordered it, and reserved an RPi. I also did some research on Addressable LED Arduino projects and will be placing an order for Addressable LEDs in the next few days. Lastly, I worked with my teammates to finalize our design plans regarding the overall testing approach. With these ideas in mind, we worked on our Design Review presentation to summarize our current plans for the implementation and testing approaches.

In the next week, Ankita and I will get the RPi hooked up to the IP camera over WiFi to make sure that we can receive/process video footage in real time. We will then test the camera for things like image quality, data transfer latency to RPi, and battery life. I will also begin working on the Arduino code that can take in incoming information packets (simulated for now, but eventually from the RPi) and translate them into corresponding changes for the Addressable LEDs. Before I can actually begin coding, though, I need to determine a rigorous set of rules regarding should be legal/illegal for our light control system to do. Once the code is working, I will breadboard the Arduino to some standard LEDs to simulate a four-way intersection for testing.