What this basically is a survellience system; the sensors would pick up body heat or motion and the webcam would turn in that general direction and then take a picture (frame) before saving it onto the computer.
The idea behind our piece is really simple. In essence what is supposed to happen is, the 3 sensors are constantly monitoring the space and when someone passes by a sensor it will trigger something in the Arduino code (because the code is always reading the digital output for info) which would tell the servo to move to the appropriate angle and then tell Processing to take a picture (frame) and add it to the created mov file. The sensors are angled in such a way that it technically SHOULD span over 180 degrees (approximately 180-200 –ish). We took kind of a security camera, voyeuristic kind of approach to the project as this kind of theme has been brought up several times this year. We initially thought it would be cool to have like a cake or a slice of cake on a table in a box and when someone tried to take a piece the camera would catch them and shine a flash light on them and perhaps make a siren noise. That concept was quickly discarded as we thought it was not complicated enough; little did we know complexity had nothing to do with it – it was all conceptual (that’s what really counted).
The hardware that was required for the piece to work is as follows:
The software that was required for the piece to work is as follows:
The good points to our project were definitely the working parts. As such here is the list:
The bad points to our project were defined by the failures or the parts of the piece that did not work according to plan. They are as follows:
During the final showing of our project to the class on April 11, 2008, we had better than expected results. I was afraid that the power surge yesterday had crippled our project and my laptop but surprisingly upon connecting everything the program, servo, and laptop seemed to be in working order. We glue-gunned the Webcam on top of the servo and fired up the programs and Arduino to test it out just prior to our showing. Though it was not working entirely the way we would have liked it still worked nonetheless. The servo, instead of staying in the middle and moving to the location it would be instructed to, would scan from left to right and take pictures when the sensors were triggered, which was fairly often. Or so we thought; upon closer inspection, it turned out that the camera was not actually taking pictures – great another problem. After scrutinizing the Processing code, I had realized that I had inputted the wrong serial port and changing that quickly dispatched the error. All in all it was a decent showing, even though it was technically not working. Still we were proud of our accomplishment, especially since a week before the critique we did not know if we could complete it in time with all the stupid errors.
During the whole time we were working on this project most, or rather almost all of the dilemmas we ran into were rather stupid ones and in hindsight, easily solved. Such solutions recorded were like, wrong ports being used, a different laptop, drivers not being present, random segments of code, etc. All in all minor, stupid mistakes. Though the piece did turn out as expected, it was still a piece somewhat worthy of Norm’s praise, even he didn’t think we could pull it off, haha.
If the opportunity arises, we will take the project to the next level. We will rework it so that the sensors and servo and Arduino communicate without a hitch and possibly even alter the concept of the entire thing or add more things on. At the moment however, we are going to leave it as is.
We started off by trying to gather some ideas and see which one would work and which one would not.We couldnt really come up with any ideas so we just kind of let it flow to see if anything would just pop up in our mind randomly.
We continued our brain storming and finally came up with one. Our very first original idea was to have a sensor and a camera attached to a motor or something, and as soon as someone walks pass the sensor the camera would follow the person and take a picture of the person. With this idea we decided to go talk to Norm about it.
We went up to Norm and told him our idea, and he gave us some insightful information back, and with his advice we went further more by adding two more sensors so it would have more data for the program to pick up exactly where the person would be. Norm also suggested to use a Servo instead because it gives more power. The only bad thing about the Servo is that it will only turn 180 degrees, therefore we would have to place this device either at a corner of the room or against one of the four walls.
We finally went online to buy the sensors and the servo, now we are just waiting for its arrival.
The parts finally arrived so began to construct the device. We used a big piece of wood to build a custom box and drilled out three holes on each side and attached the sensor to each of the hole. While we were waiting for the glue to dry and everything, we began to work on the programming part, just trying to test out to see if each part works. We went to different sites to look for code to try with, Brian was trying to get the processing to communicate with the camera and I was looking to just test out to see if the servo works. Things did not really go our way, because we could not really get it to work, the Servo is twitching and not really rotating and the camera would not capture a frame.
We went to Norm and David for help respectivity, Norm was able to help me with the Servo, I finally got it to work properly while David and Brian were still trying to figure out what went wrong.
Then I went on to test out the sensors while Brian finally got the camera to capture a frame, I think he was just missing a code or something. Just when things seem to get brighter, the senors do not work. Brian is getting frustrated becuase he is trying to find out how to make processing and arduino communicate with each other. We've decided to email Norm and David to ask all the questions we need to ask.
After getting help, we tried to work on it again, we spend almost 5 hours just trying to find a way to make the two programs communicate and also trying to make the senor to work with the servo. Nothing was working at all, so we began to see if we should look for another an alternative with this. After dinner, we've decided to give this one more try, and wow mircale happens. Brian was able to finally get arduino to send singal to the processing, now its all about putting everything together.
We tried to program it to make it the way we want it but it seems to fail big time. The sensors seem to be really sensitive and it is picking up motions and heat every where. The servo is constantly rotating back and forth, it never really stablize in one position and it is giving us headache again. We were just trying to calibrate it to see if thats the problem but it wasn't. We again went to David for help, but it doesnt seem like he knows the problem as well. With less than a week before we have to present, we slowly starting to give up.
On the day before we present We got together one more time to test it hoping mircale would happen again, but it did not, in fact, it even gave Brian's laptop a serial port error, we were quite nervous but we did not have time so we decided to just show the class what we have.
So we finally showed it to the class, and they seem to be quite impressed already, although we think other people did so much better. I guess we were satisflied we what we had. Hopefully we can fix this up and get it work next year.