This week, I continued work on testing all the individual parts. I tested the motor encoders by setting them over the motor encoder encoder wheel and manually turning it as the encoders still aren’t attached as the frame doesn’t have a good way to attach them.
I also plugged in the Raspberry Pi camera and played around with it. I was able to take pictures and then I was able to have it track an object with some very basic computer vision. We are using OpenCV in Python. Here is an screenshot of it working. The brightly-colored orange target is a 3D-printed thing I had sitting around. On the right is a mask showing all pixels of a target color. On the left is the image with a blue circle around where the Raspberry Pi thinks the target is.
Next week, I would like to work with the team to get at least two vehicles put together and start testing communication/movement with them. So far, all of the parts work individually, but we haven’t attached them all to a vehicle. Once we have that, we can really dive into the distributed aspect of the project.