We were finally able to properly drill the acrylic without cracking it! Attempt 3 was a success.
(Acrylic still has protective plastic on it)
We spent last Friday night trying to setup the camera mount on the labyrinth board.
We’ve narrowed down our mounting supplies to a ~0.09″ piece of acrylic, four 3/8″ all thread rods, and a 3’x3′ wood base.
We’ve discovered a huge problem with our ~0.09″ acrylic and Patrick’s (concrete?) drill bits. The bits seem to be introducing a large amount of torque on the surface of the acrylic, causing the plexiglass to instantly crack upon drilling.
We’ve been able to slowly work our way up from 1/32″ bits to 3/8″ to fit the all thread, but this process is extremely tedious. At $7/sheet for the plexiglass, it seems rather expensive for us to experiment with various bits until all four 3/8″ holes are drilled, not to mention the 2″ hole centered for the webcam.
We’re now on the search for a thicker sheet of acrylic. Hopefully this will allow us to begin with a 1/4″ bit and work our way to the 3/8″ bit.
This week, we introduced ourselves to MATLAB and the wonderful Image Acquisition Toolbox.
We are using a Logitech Ultra Vision webcam as our image capture device. Interfacing this with MATLAB was a simple one-liner using the function videoinput(‘winvideo’) and properly selecting our resolution format as RGB24_640x480.
We are facing issues with autofocus and shadows on the webcamera. Here is a snapshot directly from MATLAB.
Another issue we face is the mounting of the webcam to accurately track hazards.
We are at a fork in the road, deciding whether to paint or not paint the board. Not painting the board would require us to securely mount the webcam and manually hardcode the hazards into our software. We believe this is the method undertaken by the team on youtube.
In our opinion, we should hold off on painting until we read the image processing books we found: (Digital Image Processing Using Matlab by Woods and Gonzalez).
We are also considering the use of OPENCV over MATLAB, but neither Mike or I can install it on our MACs, due to some macports cmake issues.
First post…testing the capabilities of WORDPRESS!
