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Cole’s Status Report for Apr. 12

This week I started making the box that will hold all the components for our robot. I could not find a free version with shelves so I had to CAD those myself. The idea is that we can organize the components so that the things that are seperate systems from interfering with each other.

I also helped to start decouple the machine-soldered pins on the motor driver so that we can make the connections permanent as we start to finalize the robot.

This coming week I will start to solder the boards that connect the lipos that will power the electronics and the robot itself.  I will also be adding the heat shielding where we can to minimize damage to the lipos.

 

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Kushaans’ reflection for 3/31

This week I was focused on setting up the pi for integration. This involved porting the model to it, setting up all the libraries, getting an idea of mounting, and getting some benchmarks.

I wanted to get some performance benchmarks of our CV model on the pi. Previously, I found that the latency on the model was about 4 seconds on the initial pass, which was too slow for our uses. However, when running it in a loop, it seems to be at around .8-1s per frame, which is exactly what we were looking for. Seeing the anomaly on a cold start is good, because we don’t have to switch to a jetson.

 

The libraries were being weird, and I ended up needing to reflash the Pi OS, after which all the image taking software worked well. I also hooked up some decent debugging tools, so we can see the (mis)predictions correctly.

For mounting, we discovered some of the issues with the Pi and batteries, particularly I found that we need the camera to be pretty high up and the ribbon connector means the pi will probably be near the top of the housing.