Week 2

 

This week, we accomplished the following:

• -          Found a viable power source and display cable. We used a laptop to power the Raspberry Pi.
  
• -          Connected a Raspberry Pi to the computer (LEDs lit up to show connection).
  
• -      Connected the camera to the Raspberry Pi and tested to see it was working correctly.
• -      Assembled the Pimoroni Pan-Tilt HAT and mounted the camera in to the Pan-Tilt
• -          Found resources to help with the software side of the project, enabling and taking pictures with the camera.
  

 

However, we ran into the following problems:

• -          Raspberry Pi and Coral USB accelerator ordered did not arrive in time, they were backlocked. So we had to use a much older Raspberry Pi 3b that was brought as a contingency by one of the members. Luckily, the camera module worked on this  raspberry pi so we could make a start.
  
• -          The older Raspberry Pi proceeded to cause several issues such as; the Operating System not showing up on the display and only intermittently showing signs of a connection.
• -      No display available had a HDMI port so we had to locate an external monitor to view the display output of the raspberry pi.
• -      As we had no official power supply, we had to power the raspberry pi via USB. With the university computers, the raspberry pi was not recieving enough power to turn on when connected to the camera, it kept boot-looping. We solved this by connected it to a laptop but we were still getting low power warnings.
  

 

Tasks for next week:

• -          Find a suitable alternative to the current Raspberry Pi (a more recent version with appropriate compatibility and adequate RAM)
• -          Produce the code that can be used to test the camera arm mount either automatically or manually (pressing arrow keys)
• -          Produce the code for detecting objects and the libraries to go with it.