Colour Chaser (Colour Based Object Tracking Camera)

Overview of Activities Group Meeting As usual, we held a group meeting on Wednesday, one day before our last lab session on Thursday. Knowing that our Bench Inspection would be on next week's Thursday, we were under pressure to ensure that we completed all the actual lab work this week, though we had the option to take some extra lab time on Friday if we really needed to. Thus, we discussed our progress on the project so far and what we would need to do the next day. We also went over the materials that we would need for the Bench Inspection, checked our progress, and revised who was responsible for what. During the meeting itself, we worked on our individual log books, and updated our group's role allocation and contribution to project deliverables forms. Lab Day Some group members worked on the  project's  exterior, trying to make it look more presentable. They were able to cover all the sides of the cardboard box with thin black sheets which made it look much neater. Wel...

Overview of Activities Group Meeting We had a group meeting on Wednesday, right before the Thursday lab, in which we discussed the remaining lab work for the project, individual responsibilities, as well as the many project-management documents that we needed to have ready on the bench inspection day; i.e., in just 2 weeks! Additionally, it was decided that on this week's lab day, two group members would start working on the poster and the blog, respectively; these two items would also be needed for the bench inspection day. Thursday Lab On the lab day, we continued were we left off, by testing the servos again, but with new updated code. Blissfully, the servo responsible for vertical rotation worked fine, with about a 90 degree range of motion, between pointing straight ahead, and pointing straight up. Interestingly, it pointed higher at lower angles. Moreover, when we asked it to move to the same position it was at, it would make a tiny negligible movement, and then settle b...

Overview To start the week off, we held a meeting the day before going to the lab to discuss our progress so far and what we needed to do next time in the lab. We also discussed our responsibilities and started our individual logs, since we only had a project log, for the whole group, so far. The next day, we went to the lab and started the day off by testing the raspberry pi web-cam, which we had connected the week before. The camera produced a video output on the screen but that output only updated every few seconds, i.e., it had a low FPS. This would need to be improved later, but for now, we were happy to see that the web-cam was connected properly and working. Next, we attached the camera to the rotating holder using a small piece of cardboard and some red tape. Next we took a cardboard box from the lab technicians to act as casing for our electronics and wiring. Most of us spent a few hours just carving out different holes for all the wiring coming out of the pi. We also spent so...

Overview of Activities We started our first lab day by collecting our components from the lab technicians. We checked that everything had arrived and, to our surprise, we had too many components. In retrospect, it was unnecessary to order two power supplies and two sensors, etc.; However, since we were new to these kinds of projects, we were very concerned about components getting damaged, or anything else going wrong. This greatly increased the amount of money spent on the components. Thankfully, our supervisor had convinced us against ordering a backup raspberry pi! As it was too expensive to justify. Furthermore, we had ordered two servo motors, to control the horizontal and vertical inclination of the rotating platform, on which the camera would be mounted; however, we found out on the lab day that the rotating platform itself came with two servos, integrated within it, so we wouldn't need to use the external servos. We started by opening different boxes and familiarising ourse...

Introduction Recently, object identification and tracking technology has seen an increase in its day-to-day applications. For example, it is now being used to track lecturers and speakers in recordings of live sessions. This project was an attempt to explore this new and emerging field of technology. The Colour Chaser is a stationary object tracking device, which tracks an object of a certain colour specified by the user. It consists of a webcam and a colour sensor mounted on a pan-tilt rotating mechanism. Two servo motors control the pan and tilt, respectively, to ensure that the camera always faces the object being tracked. The entire system is controlled by a Raspberry Pi 4 (model B), which utilises a combination of the sensor's colour readings and the webcam's video capture, to calculate the vertical or horizontal rotations required from the servos. here is a photo of the Colour Chaser in action: Planning  This is a Year-2 group project that was meant to be implemente...