Team Status Report #3 (2/16-2/22)

This week, our team presented the design review slides (shout out to Maddie!). We also have been working independently on our specific parts of the project. Emma was successful at setting up the Raspberry Pi and configuring the camera. We took our first photo and video! Maddie has been working on writing code to generate test images for our map generation algorithm. She is going to continue to work on that next week and to find and write code for a stepper motor for the z-directional movement. Abie is working on creating the color classifying algorithm for coral health detection.

As a team, we will be discussing next week how we should implement the application and how we are going to configure the back end to the Raspberry Pi. Emma did some initial research on connecting an application or website to a Pi and found that the Node.js software and JavaScript can be used to send commands to control the GPIO pins and the camera. Maddie suggested maybe using Python and Tkinter since that is what she is familiar with, but we haven’t looked into whether this can connect on the back end to the Pi yet. We will be meeting early next week to go over this and come up with a design plan.

We will also go over whether we think the camera system is sufficient for our needs. One current risk we have is that the camera has a slow frame rate so the video is not smooth. We will be looking into whether a Raspberry Pi 5 would improve this, and if we can write a code script to change the frame rate with the downside of losing photo resolution. We have not made any changes to the design requirements, and our schedule has remained the same.