Pi Car Discovery/Logs

[Project Page Link]

Week 1 (Sept.3rd ~ Sept.7th)

• Brainstormed on possible project ideas.
• Scheduled a meeting with Professor.
• Decided the best strategies about this project.
• Aimed at doing Pi Car as our projects.

Week 2 (Sept.10th ~ Sept.14th )

• James and George finished the Night Light project on the breadboard and made it work. (3hrs)
• James and George created team weekly logs and project page. (1hrs)
• Zimon found the purchase link to the puttie car. (0.5hrs)
• Discussed plan for week 3 with Dr. Feher and TA David. (0.5hrs)

Videos of Night Light on the breadboard:

Picture of Night Light Parts:

• Plan for next week: Finish Night Light Project; Update log and project page; Finalize proposal and Gantt chart; Purchase materials for Pi Car.

Week 3 (Sept.17th ~ Sept.21st)

Monday:

• James learned how to use wiki and updated what the whole group have done on wiki & project page. (3hrs)
• George and James finished the inside part of the Night Light design. (1.5 hrs)
• George wrote project proposal; Zimon and James reviewed (1hr)
• Zimon designed the Gantt Chart. (1.5hrs)
• Zimon designed the Night Light shell. (3hrs)

Tuesday:

• Zimon fixed the "Night Light" shell and handed the STL file to TA. (2hrs)
• James created the "Night Light" parts picture (0.25hrs)

Thursday:

• James fixed project proposal (2hrs)
• George created the budget chart (1hr)
• Zimon created the Gantt chart (1hr)
• James and George created the powerpoint for the presentation (2hrs)
• Zimon communicated with Dr. Feher by email (0.5hrs)

Friday:

• Weekly meeting with Dr. Feher and TA David (0.5hrs)
• Divided tasks for next week (0.25hrs)

Next Week:

• Learn to use SSH / Arduino
• Learn to use Raspberry Pi
• Use open CV on Pi Car
• Learn to use PIPE (Python package)

Week 4 (Sept.24th ~ Sept.28st)

Thursday:

• James learned how to operate Arduino: use Arduino to control the light on a bread board (3hrs)
• James tried to understand the operations behind Arduino (1hr)
• George tried to understand the Raspberry Pi operations (start the program) (4hrs)
• Zimon fixed the broken Night Light shell (3hrs)
• Zimon fixed the Gantt chart (0.5hrs)

Friday:

• Weekly meeting with Dr. Feher and TA David (0.5hrs)
• Divided tasks for next week (0.25hrs)

Next Week:

• Operate Pi Car with Python
• Use open CV on Pi Car
• Learn to use PIPE (Python package)

Week 5 (Oct.1st ~ Oct.5th)

Wednesday:

• Whole group meet with other groups in Green Hall (0.5hrs)
• Whole group gathered information about how to communicate between Pi and Arduino; how to connect camera, lidar, and encoder (2hrs)
• James worked on relatively complex projects on Raspberry Pi (1hrs)

Output

• James made Arduino communicated with Raspberry Pi (3hrs)

• James and George made Pi communicated with Arduino (2hrs)

• George worked on camera and lidar (4hrs)
• Zimon worked on the encoder(3hr)
• Zimon fixed the Gantt chart (0.5hrs)

Friday:

• Weekly meeting with Dr. Feher and TA David (0.5hrs)
• Divided tasks for next week (0.25hrs)

Next Week:

• Download OpenCV and work on it
• Try to build the car once we get it

Week 6 (Oct.8th ~ Oct.12nd)

Monday:

• Group meeting: discussed midterm evaluation form (1hr)
• Whole group wrote midterm report (0.5hrs)
• George and James downloaded Open CV (2hrs)
• Problem: Have difficulties when compiling Open CV. Several errors appeared: files were truncated and some of them cannot be recognized
• We looked up online for how to debug this problem. The problem was not caused by the lack of storage, since the space left was still large enough. One possible reason is that we downloaded a redundant virtual environment.

Wednesday:

• Group meeting with TA David and Professor Feher (0.5hrs)
• James updated the weekly log (1hr)
• Zimon worked on the encoder by following the Pi Car instruction (2hrs)
• George tried to debug the installation of Raspberry Pi by creating a new virtual environment called "TV" but then failed (1hr)

Friday:

• George figured out how to take pictures by using Python (1hr)
• George and James tried to fixed the Open CV downloading problem by creating a new virtue environment and using new code (4hrs)

• Weekly meeting with Professor Feher: Debugged Open CV; figured out where the pictures were stored in Pi (2hrs)
• By talking with Professor, George and James learned how opencv related to our Picar navigation and some basic knowledge of shape detection.
• George met several failure in opencv compiling (After professor Feher left, error showed again) but george got some ideas to fix it.

      There are some important codes When George were trying to work through the problem:
      1.  mkvirtualenv tv -p python3  (This command will create a new Python virtual environment named tv using Python 3)
      2.  (following code can remove the directory build and create it again )
          rm -rf build
          mkdir build
          cd build

• Divided tasks for next week (0.25hrs)

Goals for next week:

• James works on the motor
• George works on the building the car
• Zimon works on the encoder

Week 7 (Oct.15th ~ Oct.19nd)

Monday:

• Open CV was successfully download

Wednesday:

• George accessed the Raspberry Pi Camera with OpenCV and Python (1hr)
• James and George started to assemble the car (1hr)

Thursday:

• James, Zimon and George went to Greenhall and met with Adith. We had 30 mins conversation, and found out that we are missing a gear for the encoder. Following our discussion, we had another 3 hours of lab work.
• James worked on the car base and the first layer of the car (3hrs)
• Zimon analyzed the layout of second layer (2hrs)

Friday:

• James continued his work on first layer (1hr)
• Zimon worked on the top layer configuration (1hr)
• Zimon downloaded the stl file provided from Adith (0.5hrs)
• Zimon worked on the case modification (0.5hrs)
• George continued his work on OpenCV (1hr)

Week 8 (Oct.22nd ~ Oct.26th)

Tuesday:

• James, Zimon and George worked in Greenhall with TA David.
• Building the car: Need gear for encoder; Need battery
• James worked on the car base and the first layer of the car (3hrs)
• Zimon analyzed the layout of second layer (2hrs)
• George finished working on Open CV. Open CV can detect shape (2hrs)

Wednesday:

• The whole group meet in the Green lab for three hours in the afternoon. We finally got all the parts that we need to build the car, and we thought build the car should be fast. However, problems appeared as we start the process: the gear did not fit with the encoder, the switch for the battery was not installed successfully, the motor did not move as we expected, and there was no sound for the ESC-Arduino connection.
• James tried to sand the gear into the right size but got stuck with it for more than one hour (the gear still did not fit with the encoder)
• Zimon figured out how to connect the circuit part for the second layer
• George made the servo move

In the evening, James and George meet with TA David.

• James connected the ESC to the Arduino successfully. However, we did not hear the bip sound from the ESC. (0.5hrs)
• James build the switch for the battery (1hr)
• George worked on the Pi - Arduino communication (2hrs)

Thursday:

• James updated the weekly log

Friday: Thanks to Professor. Feher for drilling the encoder gear!

• Weekly meeting with Dr. Feher and TA David (0.5hrs)
• Divided tasks for next week (0.25hrs)

Week 9 (Oct.29th ~ Nov.2nd)

Wednesday:

• James and Zimon drilled two holes at the bottom of the car (1hr)
• Zimon and James fit the fixed gear into the encoder and installed the whole thing on the car (1hr)
• George found out that there is no Simpletimer in the Arduino library. Thus, we create a Simpletimer file into the library. However, this conflicts with the wire library. Because of this, we need to delete the Simpletimer from the Arduino library.
• George and James connected the pi car and test for hundreds of times (1hr)

Friday: Shout out to the whole team that the car is finally moving! (Special thanks to Adith!) Whole group working in the Green lab for four hours. We fixed the programming error and made the car move! How do we fix the problem: Moved the Simpletimer.h file to the folder where "WASD" was stored. Then fixed the code: change from <Simpletimer.h> to "Simpletimer.h".

• George and James asked help from other graduate students on Simpletimer.h (3hrs)
• Zimon worked on building the first layer (2hrs)
• Zimon remodel the Night Light case (2hrs)

Check out what we get!

Week 10 (Nov.5th ~ Nov.9nd)

Wednesday: Shout out to my group that we can control the car! (Highly appreciate An's great help!)

• Zou An provided great help on the encoder. With his help, the encoder can work with the motor. Thus the car can be controlled. (4hrs)
• James connected the servo with the Arduino.
• Zimon found out all the errors in the "Pi Car" website and created a better version
• George and James connected the pi car and test for hundreds of times

Week 11 (Nov.12nd ~ Nov.16th)

Sunday:

• George spent a whole afternoon working in the lab, trying to figure out OpenCV problem (6hrs)
• George and James make the car move automatically, without using keyboard command (2hrs)

Monday:

• Zimon prepared materials for poster and report (1hr)
• Zimon fritzed the chart and spacer (2hrs)

Thursday:

• James fixed the wiring layout by using tapes (1hr)
• Zimon added information on the poster (1hr)

Friday:

• George successfully make the camera detect an object (3hrs)
• Weekly meeting with TA and instructor (0.5hrs)

Problem: How to use camera to recognize a line

Week 12 (Nov.19th ~ Nov.23th)

• Zimon continued working on poster (1hr)

Finished the project! Check out this video:

Things to do in the next week:

• Contact the other Pi car group to get the support gear
• Soldering the Ariduino and Pi
• Build a final version stable car
• Test drive

Week 13 (Nov.26th ~ Nov.30th)

Monday:

• Zimon bought a electronic drill (1hr)
• James build the whole pi car: connect arduino and pi with layers, connect car with layers (3hrs)
• George fixed the python code (3hrs)
• Test Drive: Found our battery and pi died

Tuesday:

• The whole group are trying to find a new battery but failed

Wednesday:

• James bought a new Pi and found a new battery (2.5hrs)
• George and James did many test drives (2hrs)
• George debugged the WASD code (4 hrs)
• James changed the plastic gear (0.5 hrs)
• Zimon print out the poster (1hr)

Thursday:

• George fixed the encoder problem, the car is running in the minimum speed (2hrs)
• George and David debugged the WASD problem, thus everything is finally under control (2hrs)
• James repaired the motor, and did test drives with George (4hrs)

Friday: (Demo Day)

• Zimon set up the presentation spot (1hr)
• George and James did many test drives in Green lab (2hrs)
• George fixed a mistake in the Arduino code (0.5 hrs)
• The whole group did a good job during the presentation (1.5 hrs)

Week 14 (Dec.3rd ~ Nov.7th)

• James worked on the report (5hrs)
• George worked on the tutorial (5hrs)
• Zimon modified the fritzing chart, and updated the Gantt chart and other information (3hrs)