Complex Kinect Blog

Over Thanksgiving break, Gracey, Peter and Vicky worked on the website, and we now have functional and aesthetic documentation! We also got the site hosted by Olin before we left for break, so it can be viewed at poe.olin.edu/2017/complexkinect

Howdy! Mechanical has been working on designing the final structure and man has it been a sprint. We have gathered all of our materials at this point and over Thanksgiving break we were able to print most of the pieces that we need to put everything together. This week we will build the final structure and get our MVP working before Friday.  We have a lot to do. We ran into some issues early in the week with the motors we purchased because we ordered the incorrect ones and we are currently in the process of deciding what to do now. We have also realized that we are going to be pressed short for time because manufacturing has proven to take longer than we had originally thought. Stay tuned

Sprint 2 ended on Friday and we have our MVP! What that means for mechanical is that we have a box that can move nine different nodes, but control 3 sets independently, using three actuators. We made our prototype with some scrap .21" hardwood with the laser cutters. We converted the rotational motion of the sliders into linear motion with a pin and rack design, with the rack mounted on a slider with ball bearings to reduce the friction. The three gears were connected with a rod so that as one gear rotates the rest rotate as well. Our challenge coincided with retaining the gears with the bearings linearly, since the gear shaft would often tilt down (it was not a perfect press fit. We ended capping both sides of the shaft to retain it, but due to a misprint, the final design was switched, so the cap was not as effective as it should have been. The biggest issues with this design is that there was a lot of friction in the gears, and the system was too constrained, which made rotatin...

With Sprint 2 finished, we took some time to reflect on our progress thus far. We did a team retrospective, discussed our +'s and Δ's and developed a team kaizen. Some major +'s: Team bonding Individuals' commitment to the project and hard work Solid presentation Some major Δ's: Document more Integrating earlier and more often Actually doing remote daily check-ins   Team Kaizen: Integrate earlier and more often. P. S. On a team health note, Peter just sneezed and a hunk of phlegm hit the floor of the PoE room. We're sending him to bed.

With Vicky's motion sensing and Gracey's facial recognition code working with a laptop webcam, we're now working to get the code working on a Raspberry Pi. Having downloaded Raspian and OpenCV onto the pi, we're now finishing up the motion sensing code via remote desktop. Meanwhile, the overall team goal for tonight is to integrate the mechanical, electrical and computing units. The mechanical and electrical elements have already been integrated and tested, so all we need is the code to work on the raspi and we'll be ready for Spring Review 2!

Our motion detection code works to detect when there is motion in any one of three side by side sections of the camera's view. Today, I worked on sending values to Serial for when each of the three sections detects any motion. I also began work on speed detection. One challenge we faced regarding speed detection is that we have no way of knowing how far away a person interacting with our sculpture is from the sculpture. This means that it is difficult to to gain an accurate reading on speed detection. For now, we are going to assume that a person interacting with our sculpture is 5 feet away from it. This should work relatively well for detecting relative speed of motion from different distances. - Vicky