Category: Jasper’s Status Reports

This week, since our project is pretty much done, I worked on the poster. It is looking pretty good at the moment, and I will only have to make some small changes for it to be ready.

This week, tried to get all the major components of our project integrated together. We were able to get the Jetson Xavier up and running with the blob detection and UI running separately, but we had trouble putting the two together. For some reason, we were able to share our internet via ethernet cable early on in this process, but it suddenly stopped working. Because of this we were unable to actually put everything together. We ended up being able to connect to the internet through the CMU wifi router (again using an ethernet cable), but since it was so late in the week, I did not have time to come in and put it together. I plan to do this next week, as I will have much more time to come in and do work. Besides that, I have everything set up on the UI side of things, so once we have it all combined, we will be in a really good spot.

For our interim demo last Wednesday, I worked on the UI a bit more. It was not exactly where it needed to be, but I will work on that and integrating all of the pieces of our project in the next few days. Besides that, since we just had Carnival, I have made no other progress.

As I wrote in the team status report, this week I finished work with the UI and cooking time algorithms. The UI is hopefully clear enough to provide a clean and intuitive experience for the user. It displays information about the detected thickness of a new piece of meat, how long the system decides it needs to cook, and which section of the grill it will go on. There is also an overhead camera feed of the grill which displays which section is which, enabling the user to be confident that the system of working as intended. I plan to add the capability of changing the remaining cooking time for any section that they select, but I do not have that working yet.

This week, progress was a bit slow, due to lots of work from other classes and other interference from life. Additionally, I am not as familiar with python as I previously thought I was. I have been using the Python library tkinter, and have something basic, but it still doesn’t look great. I am confident that it will be fine by the time we have our interim demo, though. I will have to put in a bit of extra work this upcoming week, but it is nothing that I won’t be able to handle.

We received all of our supplies that we requested, so we can now try to see how all of our parts fit together. I am still currently working on the UI because I am not yet satisfied with how everything is arranged. I am playing around with the button shapes and locations, and how to best show the sections of the grill through the camera feed. Getting the camera feed itself to show up has been a little bit of an issue as well, but I do not think it will be too complicated to fix this. I think that the main issue will be having the UI, robotic arm, and CV interact correctly with each other, but we will make it work by the time the demo comes around.

This week, I worked more with python in order to better familiarize myself with it and prepare myself for when I get to work with the touch screen hardware that we will be working with. I have also looked more into UI design to give the best user experience I can. The overall planning for the project and design of it is almost done and I am very happy with the direction it is going. We have decided to divide the grill into four sections with one piece of meat on each. The touch screen UI will then have an overhead camera feed of the grill which the user can then use to manually interact with the meat if they so choose. I am happy with what my rough draft of the UI for now, however I will definitely want to add colors that match the theme of the project. I am thinking they will be medium/dark browns and/or other similar colors. I will have to figure out what looks best once the UI is more developed.  For now, I am on track with our projected plan and I am excited to see how the project evolves over time.

This week I have primarily been brushing up on Python so that when we really get going with the project, I will be ready as well. I have coded mostly in C and C++ for the last few semesters, so this preparation was necessary for me to be able to properly contribute. I am not as well-versed in robotics or computer vision as my partners, so I most of my work will probably end up being related to UI and the software controller, rather than the two previously stated aspects. I have also been familiarizing myself with front-end development to better accommodate how a user would most likely interact with our product. I hope that this research will allow for a smooth and satisfying experience for anyone who tries it.