This past week, I discussed the purpose of a few components with Professor Tamal Mukherjee, mainly including how we plan to mount the camera that will have a top-down view of the drum rings and thus acquire data needed for CV processing. I also began to look at the pinout of the ESP32 microcontroller to determine which registers would be most relevant when interfacing with the MPU 6050 accelerometer, as well as found a few relevant OpenCV libraries and documentation that could be useful for the aforementioned processing. We did not have too much planned out for last week on our Gantt chart besides starting to research and potentially implement Computer Vision code, so I believe we are on schedule.
To remain on schedule, this upcoming week, I plan to put more time into narrowing down which OpenCV libraries are most relevant. I also will begin writing code to experiment with specific color and shape detection functions, and upload it to the group repository. This can potentially be accomplished by generating images of my own with varying levels of noise (to simulate potentially-blurry frames from the webcam) and ring sizes, and trying to detect those rings as well as filter out particular colors. I hope that this process will help us to determine color ranges when detecting the rings and drumstick tips from the camera’s video frames, as we would want to avoid having different lighting conditions affect the functionality of our project. For example, since the drumstick tips are relatively spherical, cast light/shadow on the edges and highest point will have different color values than the color we paint them in.