We got Christian a Garmin GPS smart watch for his birthday. It is about the exact opposite of the watch I probably would have guessed that he would pick, but after looking at it, I am amazed that he (again) made the perfect pick. I actually might get one of those the next time around. My Garmin Instinct is almost five years old now and going strong so I am not sure how soon that will be. I am excited to see how much he uses it. It pretty much changed the way I think about smart watches. I used it mainly as a GPS to track my exercise walks, but now I depend on the phone and message notifications that cause it to vibrate.
I started with a new project this week. I am helping a buddy on a three dimensional tracking, measuring, guidance problem. We each bought a RealSense 2d/3d camera. The bought a refurbished ThinkPad laptop with a USB 3.0 port with this project in mind. The USB 3.0 port provides for faster throughput of image data. It was really easy to get the thing up an running. It will be quite a bit more work to control the camera programmatically.
The main office area of the office in the basement has been being painted over the last week or so. I have been relegated to the dining room table. When I moved back down and was shuffling things around, I found the the lights Gene made for the bean sorting project. I am going to get them sent off to him so he can start sending me some images. We might get lucky and have our original setup work, but I think that is pretty unrealistic. We will definitely have to make modifications quite a few times until we get the whole lighting designed tweaked to the point it works with the falling beans. That is not to mention the fact that we have not even started at all on the mirror setup to see both sides of each bean.
I was able to advance on the bean sorter program sufficiently to send the computer and camera off to Gene so he can start working on the lighting. I am amazed that we are continue to move forward. This project is not moving along at lightening speed, but with Gene’s efforts and great mechanical skill and knowledge we make steady progress. Hopefully, he will be able to take some images of dropping beans and it will allow us to see the spread of the beans and whether I believe I can see them well enough in the images to do the calculations needed to sort them properly. The next big challenge is two-fold: 1) getting the beans to fall as straight as possible and 2) getting the mirror set up. After that, we will attack the lighting.
The new $243 plus tax computer arrived today and I have to admit that it is great. I loaded Linux Mint, OpenCV, Boost, Qt Creator (only for the IDE), the Wt libraries, downloaded the bean sort code from Subversion and had it compiling in three hours or so and that includes building OpenCV, Boost, and the Wt libraries from source.