Day 23 - 25 end of week 5

I was in the adirodacks visiting family and not at work for these days but I checked in on the presentation and script over wifi once a day.

Day 22

Today we created most of the presentation from based off the outline we wrote. We also created a script of things to talk about with each slide. The script wont be used for the presentation but it is a way for us to gather our thoughts for the first few dry runs of the presentation. We are trying to use as few words as possible for the presentation to make it as visual as possible and keep it interesting.

Day 21

Today I did a few minor troubleshooting things with the hardware and exchanged a few cables for ones that would work better. we also began working on the Powerpoint presentation for our talk on the 14th. We also came as close as  we have come to taking our first anaglyph. something was wrong with the processing and one of the images ended up flipped but we took two pictures and merged the red and blue/green channels to make an anaglyph form image.

Day 20

The first thing I did today was I shortened a usb extension cable that was needed to have the usb port at the edge of the case. Without it the usb port would have been too far inside the case to plug anything into so the extender makes the usb port usable. Also the new step up converter arrived today so I soldered that into place. The new step up converter can supposedly handle up to two amps of current so theoretically it should work for our system which pulls around 1.4 amps. We set up a prototype of our camera and the power system worked for about 15 minutes and that is the extent of testing we have done.

Day 19

Today I started out the day by cutting an Ethernet cable in half and soldering all of the connections back together to practice for shortening the cable. We need the cable shortened so that it will fit inside the case more easily. Soldering those eight individual connections is a bit tricky, but by doing this practice I came up with a good system for connecting the Ethernet cable wires. Then at 11 the whole Intern group went on a bike ride over to the University of Rochester and Mount Hope Cemetery. We saw the graves of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. It is a stark reminder of the sexism of the era that Douglass has two large grave stones and markers leading people to where his grave is, where as Susan B. Anthony has a small grave stone near her family members of which the males have much larger graves. After lunch we rode back to RIT and then I shortened the Ethernet cable and tested it and it worked!

Day 18

Today the search for a new step up converter continued. Searching for the step up converter was tricky because everything that we found yesterday and during the first hour today had some problem with it. Some were to weak, a lot of them were step down converters because it is a much more likely problem to have to need to step down than step up the voltage. There were only a few that we found that would work but they were on shady websites and would be shipped from China and likely not be here in an adequately short amount of time. But I found one this morning that will work perfectly and ships in two days so we ordered that. I also experimented with the possibility of working around the software challenge of getting the two cameras to take the pictures at the same time with hardware. The capture button is on the display screen module and tells one Pi to take a picture through the GPIO pins and then that Pi is supposed to communicate with the second Pi and sync when the two pictures are taken. However I talked to David about, and then experimented with the possibility of running wires from the button to the second Pi so that when the button was pushed it would send the signal to both of the Pis.

day 17

Today with the new battery charged and ready for testing, I plugged everything together and miraculously it worked! However when I attempted to repeat this success, the system overloaded the step up converter and it promptly fried. After consulting Dr. Bob Kremens and looking up a few specifications for parts, we realized that this was because the step up converter we were using was rated up to 200 Milliamps and we were trying to push 1.4 amps through it. So once we had a battery capable of doing this it fried the step up converter. Now the search for a new converter begins. It is a frustrating search because everything is either the wrong part or has some other problem. There is still hope however.