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Olivia’s Status Report for 2/24

This week, I worked on the OpenCV facial landmark detection for the stand height automation. I wrote a Python program to determine the distance between any 2 specified landmarks and tried a bunch of different face angles to see the which landmarks would be good references to use. I found that the distance between the eyebrows and the tip of the nose would be one good set of landmarks to determine head tilt use because it had significant and consistent change in distance when a user is looking up, straight on, or down.

I also worked on the Design slides and practiced for the presentation this week.

By next week, I’d like to have the acceptable thresholds of distances between landmarks determined that will signify that the ideal height has been reached and write a function to decide this.

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Team Status Report for 2/24

This week, we solidified the mechanical design of the stand as a platform jack as the base to change height and 2 linear actuators on the top platform to apply torque to the laptop.

We also decided to change our approach to the posture detection by using OpenCV instead of OpenPose. This was because we are more comfortable with OpenCV, and it will be more accommodating for incorporating libraries in OpenCV as well as integrate the face detection, posture, and interface all in Python.

 

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Olivia’s Status Report for 2/17

We have changed our method of determining the height to raise the stand from detecting eye level to detecting facial landmarks and the distances between points.

So, I’ve spent this week getting more experience with facial landmark detection with OpenCV by downloading dlib and using sample code to use the pre-trained detector to point out coordinates on my face. 

I have also downloaded OpenPose and looked into the documentation on how to use keypoints and distances between points to detect good posture versus poor posture. I have also been working on a mock up of what the user interface will look like.

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Olivia’s Status Report for 2/10

I have been doing more research into OpenCV and how it can be used for locating eyes on a person’s face. I was looking into some open source projects that have been done using eye tracking to detect if eyes are open, and I think these resources will be useful later in the project when we are trying to incorporate focus detection into the stand’s features.

At the moment, I am more concerned with the eye recognition as coordinates on the screen and in what ways I can use this information to determine the ideal height to raise the stand. From just empirical research and looking at ergonomic screen heights, I think that ensuring that the approximate y-coordinates of the user’s eyes are at the top third of the screen’s height should be the optimal height to reach. However, this will also depend on the distance between the user and their laptop, so I think we will need to incorporate a distance sensor in order to guide the user to place their laptop at an ergonomic distance away of about 30 inches.

But I would like to have more certainty in whether these are good metrics to use in order to determine the screen’s ideal height, so I will continue to research this as well as OpenCV eye detection. I am currently on schedule and would like to have these height determination methods solidified by next week.

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Team Status Report for 2/10

After receiving feedback from our proposal, we met to discuss and solidify the details of the stand’s mechanics. We are currently thinking about using a 3D printed platform jack as the base of our stand that can smoothly raise a laptop by turning a knob. We found an open source design of a platform jack and sent that to be printed at a smaller scale so that we can see how the mechanism would work with our weight and size requirements.

We have decided to continue our design process with a smaller version of the stand since it would take up a large portion of our budget to fully 3D print the design of the stand with the dimensions we have in mind for the final product. So, we will use this smaller model to experiment with the weight, decide how much torque is needed to turn the dial and raise the stand, and how we can tweak the design to be more portable and compact before we finally print the full sized stand. 

Additionally, we would like to see how the linear actuator can be used in combination with the platform jack to tilt the screen of a laptop. We will then discern how we can incorporate this mechanism into our final design, and in what ways we will need to scale the dimensions to better fit our requirements.