Welcome to our blog.

This blog is dedicated to our project: Swarm tracking System. We started this at the request of our school the PXL university college. The purpose of the project is to coordinate one or more Doodle Bots using feedback from a camera.

We plan to achieve this by using a centralized server connected to the Doodlers and the camera who will do all the image processing and calculations. Meanwhile a client can connect to the server to take control over the Doodle Bots. This can easily be done using JavaScript though we are unsure whether this might negatively influence the performance. The Doodle Bots will use Bluegiga's BLE112 to communicate with the server. The usefull thing about the BLE112 is that it can also be used to control our bots. The camera, a Logitec C270, will be suspended over the surface on which the swarm will draw, this way it will have the best view.

The underlying purpose of this project is not to make a product to sell or distribute (although it will be completely open source) but primary this project is supposed to teach us stuff only experience can teach.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

What we have done so far

We were supposed to use this blog to keep people updated on our progress, and as you can see that sort of didn't work out so well until now so here is a list of the stuff did so far.

The first two to three weeks we have been busy brainstorming trying to think of the best way to solve our problem. During these frequent brainstorm sessions we discussed which technologies we could best use for our project and what the best way is to use these. We discussed whether it would be better to use JavaScript or C++ with the OpenCV library. Since Wilco (who is the lead programmer) has the most experience with the first and since it is way easier to make our client software cross platform with HTML, we chose for JavaScript. We also discussed what was to use as a way for our server and bots to communicate. Since it had to be wireless (just imagine the mess if we would connect them with cables) we had two options, WiFi and Bluetooth, we chose the later because WiFi is a tad overkill, we only need to send a few instructions, not large streams of data. The Bluetooth module we eventually went for is a low energy module, meaning it doesn't require big batteries, it can be powered by a simple coin battery.

As early as week three Wilco has been toying around with JavaScript, working on the client software and experimenting with the tracking. This week he managed to connect with the evaluationkit of the BLE112 using JavaScript (which took some tweaking)  and he is now going to try and program the thing.

We will try to keep up with these posts in the future. We will post at least one every week to keep you updated. Thanks for reading ;)
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)