Complex Kinect Blog

Yesterday was demo day for our POE project. We ended up having a very successful demo. Our structure was able to move in response to motion and people had a lot of fun walking in front of it and trying it out. People were able to select from motion mode, audio mode, and demo mode using our web application running locally on the raspberry pi. It was really amazing how it all came together in the end!

Sometime between the end of our last sprint and when we were ready to start testing our finalized code, our raspberry pi camera stopped working. We began getting messages telling us to check all our connections and update our firmware. We googled all the messages we were getting and checked all our connections several times but were not able to resolve our errors. In class on Friday, we told Aaron what was going on and he gave us two more raspberry pi cameras to try. We tried both of those cameras (or so we thought) and nothing was working. We were getting different error messages with different cameras but still error messages nonetheless. Katya and I spent several hours last night trying our camera on three different raspberry pis (but still with our SD card) and trying to disconnect and reconnect all camera connections. Instead of running our code, we simply tried (and failed) to take a still image with each camera. Finally, we met this morning and decided we should start documentin...

The final sprint has come to pass and demo day is just around the corner! The mechanical team has worked hard to get the entire mechanical system up and running and the software/electrical team is currently working toe get the system flawlessly integrated with the web app and integrating the sound detection code into the system. We are really excited about the final demo day and we think we are in good shape for getting all of our ducks in a row in time. Stay tuned!

We have an MVP! (Depending on your definition of functioning) last night the whole team worked really hard to fabricate and assemble the entire structure. We managed to fabricate the entire frame and get 9 origami nodes fabricated and mounted to the frame. Our integrated system was a 3x3 matrix moving in response to motion in the surrounding environment however the gearing system for moving the nodes open and close is not working as well as we expected due the spring force caused by the node that we had not accounted for in our design. Our goals for the next sprint is to fix our mechanical system so that the nodes open and close smoothly, test and incorporate our motion code for a 3x6 frame, get our web app for controlling the structure up and running, and manufacture the remaining 9 origami node.