Emma Hoffman’s Status Report 2/22

This week I spent time figuring out how to set up the Raspberry Pi. I got the Pi from the ECE inventory but ran into a roadblock when I realized that I needed to upload and customize the OS on the raspberry pi, which required configuring an SD card. My computer does not have an SD card slot, so I needed to find a USB-C to SD card connector. I asked my group if they had one, and nobody did, but one of my group members suggested that I could loan one from IDEATE. Luckily, I did not have to wait for one to ship and IDEATE let me borrow a converter. Once I had this, I was able to follow instructions online to configure the SD card to connect to my iPhone WiFi Hotspot. Ideally I could connect to CMU-SECURE because I feel like this would allow for faster processing speed, but I could not figure out how to set this up. I will try with the hotspot for now and see if it will work. Once I had the Pi set up I was able to troubleshoot an error when trying to SSH into the Pi and get into the device. I made sure Python was installed, changed settings so I can remotely access the GPIO pins for the motor control, and began to figure out how to run python scripts on the Pi. 

I noticed that a lot of people use RealVNC to run python scripts and have a desktop environment on their computer. They have a free version of this that works over the Cloud, and another version that costs $3.69 a month that has LAN access. LAN would be faster, but I’m not sure if we need it right now. I downloaded the free version, and configured the pi and pi camera to take video while writing commands into the terminal on the VNC. It was able to take continuous video, but there was not a way to take video and photos at the same time. I took some test photos and saved them onto the VNC project. The video was a little laggy but the quality was pretty clear. It makes the objects look closer than they actually are in the frame. I tried to set up a live stream using a YouTube tutorial but they used the library picamera instead of picamera2, which I could not download onto the pi. 

I am currently working on designing the user interface and figuring out how we can make an application or website control the raspberry pi video and photos. I’m not sure right now if we want to have all of this on VNC or not. Ideally the user only has to configure the pi to connect to their WiFi and does not have to control the pi directly after that.

I am currently on schedule. I also got the motors and motor driver from the manufacturer so I will be working on setting those up with the pi next. Next week I hope to have the motors working correctly with the pi and have a plan on how to integrate the pi camera with an external application or website.