This week, the rest of the critical parts arrived. As such, I was able to move into the testing phase for the components. Since I am still in the earlier stages of testing and integrating the components, my focus has been primarily on the setup process and ensuring basic connectivity. First, for the camera (IMX219), it is connected via CSI-2, so the system detects it under “/dev/video*; v4l2-ctl –list-devices”, instead of with “lsusb”. I then made sure that v4l-utils and gstreamer were installed and updated to interact with the camera. More testing needs to be done to actually access the video feed, but the device is being detected. Second, for the IMU (BNO055), it communicates over I2C. As such, I use the command “i2cdetect” to check that the module is detected on the I2C bus of the Jetson Orin Nano. Next, I will use the smbus python library to read the raw sensor data.
I also worked on configuring the Jetson Orin Nano for headless operation, ensuring that we can all access and interact with the system without needing an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Headless will be the operation mode for the project’s final phase, as we will not be able to have a monitor attached to the user. This is done through SSH’ing on my laptop. I also set up VNC (Virtual Network Computing) to get a visual remote desktop. Initially, I was experimenting with using Vino, but that has varying performance depending on the exact Jetson device being used. As such, I ended up swapping to x11vnc. This can be connected to using the built-in VNC client on a MacBook (“Screen Sharing” app). Separately, there were some initial issues with getting the wifi to work properly (due to some user privilege issues), but they have been resolved.
Regarding the schedule, I am about a week behind the Gantt chart. This is because I did not consider that Spring Break was my “Week 5”, so I misjudged the actual dates. I plan to finish testing of each component by this week to get back on schedule. I also want to double check that the Jetson Orin Nano works on CMU-Secure/Device, as I have just been testing on my home network.