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)