Accomplishments
This week, I went to Salem’s multiple times in order to try and get testing data. On Monday, Simon and I went twice (second time with Shubhi as well) to get WiFi on the RPis up and running and debug an error with S3 bucket downloading/uploading. We ran into an issue in the morning with the public WiFi having an “OK” prompt, which effectively blocks connections on a Raspberry Pi. However, Salem’s was kind enough to give us their private network, and so we were able to set up WiFi on all of the Raspberry Pi 4s. In the downtime between our trips to Salem’s, I worked with Simon to make detecting the number of people in a line more robust and to at least work somewhat. All three of us then went on Thursday to actually set up our full system and let it run, but we ran into issues debugging (since we needed to copy code to all of the RPis and then change minute aspects in order to upload different data), and fixing the camera angles, since the RPi camera modules have a very short connector the the RPi itself. Today we went again, but weren’t able to collect data from the full system running because a few of the employees there today were uncomfortable with being recorded. Therefore, we took pictures of people’s shopping carts, and used an empty checkout lane to record videos for testing throughput calculations. I also started working on the final presentation slides, since that’s coming up.
Progress
In terms of progress, I am now behind the day-to-day schedule that I created by a few days, mostly because setting up the integrated system at Salem’s had so many setbacks preventing us from running the full system for data collection. In terms of what I will be doing this upcoming week to catch up, we need to test our integrated system completely. Therefore, I’ll try to help for finalizing individual component testing, and after that we can try to go on a day where the employees at Salem’s won’t be uncomfortable with their hands being recorded for throughput.
New Tools
In terms of new tools and technologies that I managed to learn over the course of this semester, I was quite unfamiliar with most of the technologies used in our project. I didn’t know how to use YOLO, I never used AWS S3 buckets, and I didn’t do much programming at all with Raspberry Pis prior to this semester. My method of learning how to use these tools and technologies was to mainly browse the documentation available for most of my needs, and checking various forum posts to debug when needed were vital to learning how to implement various things for this project. Sometimes reading the forum posts led to pitfalls (i.e with the raspberry pis, one of the features for getting addition WiFi connections was only supported on a legacy OS, and so I used up a lot of time trying to implement the wrong solution).