Ashley’s Status Report for 10/20

Last week, I mainly focused on working on the design review with my teammates. For the hardware subsystem of our design, we thought that only having the ultrasonic sensor might not be enough to detect all item placement. A weight sensor in addition to the ultrasonic sensor could help improve the accuracy of item placement detection, for thin materials like paper. We also considered adding more ultrasonic sensors for better accuracy, which should not be too much of a change in code that I already have. The number of ultrasonic sensors used will be decided when I’m able to start testing with it.
While I did not have much time over fall break, I took some time to look into how I can use both the ultrasonic sensor and the weight sensor at the same time, and the possible models that I can order. I found a useful starter code and testing tutorial for the HX711 model. I hope to place an order for this by next week. In addition, we decided on the servo model and placed the order. So I also looked into the tutorial for this one too and found a tutorial that shows how I can control the angle and speed of the servo with Arduino.
I realized that working with hardware components and testing them require working with the actual components in person, and using online tools like Tinkercad has many limitations since the software does not have all the components that we are using. I hope to start testing and finalize hardware code on campus once I get back and receive the Arducam and the servo motor. I also hope to figure out how to integrate the camera functionality with Jetson while it’s being used for classification, as I am also in charge of the hardware integration.