Stage (18) Week Commencing (05/05/14)
Week 30
Description
This week was my first week back at uni after the holidays, I managed to get to uni and spend some time with my lecturer sorting out some of the issues I was having with the audio trigger interfering with the kinect stuff. The issue was we where overloading the Arduino board with info and getting transmission issues. Another issue was that, the Arduino board was sending transmissions but was not receiving them from processing. This is because once again I was overloading the board with data. To solve this my lecturer said I had to work in-between the buffers of the Arduino board, the trick was getting the two systems to work together using different ports (myport2 - base servo) meaning there was less transmission errors, I also cancelled out a lot of the script that was sending values to the print box. We tested this out by making a loop for the base servo and we called this 'dummy' the idea of the dummy loop was to make sure that both systems worked together without any issues or overloading the board with transmission data.
I also bought a new USB hub, the one I originally purchased from e-bay was usb 3.0 but wasn't back compatible to usb 2.0 which is what both the Arduino and Kinect run off.
I have concerns that there may be future issues regarding overloading the board and I have purchased another Arduino Leonardo board just incase. I have also been thinking about designing the posters for the project for the final degree show. I have come up with two designs a picture of the robot and a graphically designed imagine depicting a brain made up of parts of a motherboard. (1.3)
Feelings.
Feeling a unsure about things at the moment, time is ticking and I'm struggling to find the time I need on the project. I don't really know how its going to run when I try and get everything working together.
Evaluation.
This weeks session was good I am happy to be back at uni again and feel like having some time to get on with stuff has been invaluable with the submission dates on the horizon. As for actual progress of the project working together with my lecturer we overcome the transmission errors and managed to get things working together.. and I have to say the robot has never worked so well. Normally theres a lot of stopping and starting processing because it takes so much ram to load the kinect stuff and apple script and everything else but after assigning different ports things seem to be working flawlessly. (1.1), (1.2)
Analysis
The current situation of the project is that the mouth mechanism (eliza) works great with the kinect but there is still a long way to go i'm having tracking issues. But saying that I am happy that the project is still moving in the right direction so even though I'm worried about deadlines I still cannot complain about that output of work from this session. I am still happy with how the mechanisms are all operating there is no technical issues with the physical build at this time, which is brilliant after all the hassle of replacing servos and the lip mechanism.
Conclusion
I am feeling ok about things at the moment, the project is still moving forward and I feel i am achieving what I can in the time frame I have left. I am still putting together the written side of the project and have been researching some of Chomsky's ideleogies of the constrains of A.I in terms of understanding and modelling.
Action Plan
Next session i would like to get the tracking nailed and working then I can get on with putting the lips and mouth left and right (swing) into the same loop as the audio trigger stuff. Then it's just the eyes to sort out but I might just have them running on a constant loop rather than trying to rig them up to the kinect because I think that would be pushing it for both time and overloading the board. ... but we will see.
1.1
1.2
1.3
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