“For every step in a direction, one must first create a universe.”

Probably someone.

Hei Bloggen! K9z f9z…

After the preliminary introduction of this year´s Smart Systems course, and the introduction of the Micro Mouse project as a competitive engineering aspect, we sat down as a group to discuss what we wanted to achieve.

Who are we?

Our group consists of five members who are also collaborating on the Bachelor project next semester with KSAT 🛰️. Our group consist of: 

• Mats Bergum – Electrical Engineer ⚡
• Harald Berzinis – Electrical Engineer ⚡
• Christopher Daffinrud – Computer Engineer 🖱️
• Ole Eirik Solberg Seljordlia – Computer Engineer 🖱️
• Hannes Weigel – Computer Engineer 🖱️

We will most likely have access to a camera-component, primarily meant for our Bachelor project, in Smart Systems and one of our goals during this course is to take advantage of that. The Micro Mouse project was therefore not ideal for our case so we discussed other options. We quickly had the idea that we wanted to make a Turret. Our project name:

TURRET SYNDROME

System description and requirements

Our Turret will use a camera for object detection and recognition and a LIDAR for object ranging. The object recognition should then trigger an action of shooting the undesired object with a BB-gun (the exact solution for this is tbd).

We created an initial overview of some requirements a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) should have: 

• The system´s software shall be able to detect an object with a distinctive color (green/red) on a distance of five meters. 
• The system´s software shall be able to identify which color the object has (green/red) on a distance of five meters. 
• The system’s camera and barrel shall be able to rotate for a total of 360 degrees azimuth.  
• The system’s camera and barrel shall be able to elevate between 0 and 30 degrees in altitude.  
• The system shall be able to manually fire an object towards the detected colored balloon. 

Components and testing

To realize the MVP-requirements we wrote down a list of components and equipment we needed. We received the following from Stephen:

• Two stepper motors
• Two motor controllers
• One LiDAR
• Raspberry Pi 4
• PyCam
• Touch Display for Raspberry Pi

Throughout the week we also tested some of the components to make sure they work correctly. We tested the motor controllers together with the stepper motors and the Pi. We also checked if we were able to read data from the LIDAR using the Pi. The code was written in C++ 11.

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Upcoming tasks

We created a Kanban-board through Azure Devops to keep track of upcoming tasks and delegated them between our group members. These tasks included: 

• Setting up a developer environment – Azure Devops and Git for documentation.
• Initial CAD-design 
• Initial Interface-mapping 
• ABC functionality list. (A = Critical, B = Beneficial, C = Desirable)

To round up this weeks blog post, we in Turret Syndrome would like to finish off with another quote while looking forward to next weeks lecture and tasks:

“For every step in the right direction, one must often take several other steps.”

Someone else… Probably