We have finally gotten our camera, which makes us able to proceed with the camera ROS programming and making the frame for camera. The site where we bought the camera did not have specifications for how far it was between the screws on the camera and neither the size of the lens, this meant that we could not make a proper frame for the camera before we got it. The frame is made by using legos for the legs of the frame, the cameras are mounted on a wooden plate attached with glue to the lego. The cameras will be attached to the wood with screws, we are going to set up the cameras so they are parallel with each other and have the same height. The distance between the cameras are going to be five centimeters, which we need in order to achieve proper stereo vision.
Now that we have our cameras we can now start to integrate them into our Raspberry Pi. We get to test how the cameras output data and how we can adapt to use the output that in our ROS programming. We already had some ROS uvc_camera program that we made to combine two cameras into one stereo camera using a stereo ROS nodelet. We had to use two monocular cameras as one stereo camera because we did not get a stereo camera. The RTABmap ROS program needs stereo images in order to proper process the images into the 3d mapping.
We have still not been able to create our own ROS package with PIGPIO and the Arduino stepper library working. We where hoping to have it done by the time the cameras came but it has proven more difficult than expected. We have migrated our code from the arduino and gotten it to compile for ros after alot of trouble with CMake. Although we still get a runtime error when we try to run the package but we belive this is our last hurdle to having the car running.