Thursday, August 22, 2013

24 + 25 the end

So these last two days have been spent preparing our presentation. Today we did a run through where we presented in front of all the other interns, it was pretty good and there were only a few minor changes to make. Tomorrow we present and the cis summer intern program is over. I learned a lot from this experience, much much more than I anticipated.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

22 + 23 More

These past two days have been spent adding more and more features. The primary feature we added was a zoom function when calibrating such that there is greater accuracy. This feature zooms in a small portion of pixels around the cursor and makes the spot the cursor is on red. More work has also been done for the final presentation mainly images or other visual aids. Specifically today we worked on a flow chart of the image processing.

Friday, August 16, 2013

21 Moving out the array + goodbye undergrads

After the morning meeting we quickly solved the issue we experienced yesterday when trying to capture from the pi cams. After this was complete and we had an acceptable capture the array was ready to be moved as our lab is being prepped for this years freshman imaging science students. The rest of the day was spent moving the array to the bat cave, eating food at our intern BBQ, and commenting the already existing code.
More commenting tomorrow.

20 Waiting for the news

After the morning meeting I started documenting the operation of our program while waiting to hear about the status of our computer. In order to find out about the computer we had to order a replacement part and fix it to see if there was any corruption or data loss. Luckily when ~2 came by the part showed up and the computer is now operating perfectly. Tomorrow is the undergrads last day and the last day we have access to the array so we plan to test some file streaming stuff and then move it away.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

19 Catastrophic failure

Productive day! It started that way at least. Initially we worked on fixing the FPS counter so we could measure our performance increases. However once we began monitoring performance we noticed it was significantly lower than our previously recorded figures. We tried removing some changes we made and we figured out that it functioned poorly without any of the features we have added recently. After checking some hardware issues we realized that the CPU was overheating and the cooling system had been failing. Darn.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

18 Post Mees

Today was quite an eventful day. The day began in a rather unusual manner as interns poured in at various times due to the lack of a morning meeting. Mees went so late that we were allowed some leeway about our arrival time. Surprisingly the entire Multi-Camera Array lab was here and ready to roll by 9:00. All that shenanigans aside today was spent primarily added functionality and easing use of the application. With this came a whole bunch of bugs.

Tomorrow we are thinking of working on data streaming issues and investigating the effectiveness of using the Point Grays via USB.

16 + 17 Friends and stars and stuff

16:

Today was take a friend to work day. I brought my good friend Michael from our robotics team. He is going into his sophomore year of high school so this was a good opportunity for him to see what the internship program was all about.

Overall it was an enjoyable day, and we even managed to accomplish a reasonable amount of work.

17:

Today (Yesterday now) we went to Mees observatory. I clocked in at about 3 and worked until 5 when we went to Mendon Ponds Park to eat and then to the observatory. We saw lots of cool stars and galaxies and such and even a few meteorites.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

15 Testing different Array configurations

Overall today was a pretty slow day, work did ramp up after lunch when we were able to use the primary computer in our lab. Once we were on it, we tested other camera configurations, part of our project that is technically more specific to Nate. We tested varying things from curved arrays to different numbers of cameras. An array of 24 cameras was pretty cool.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

14 More features, more fixes

This morning we quickly solved the issue we had left yesterday. We soon realized the problem causing some difficulty in the arrays processing was a lack of files for it to read. The features we added today were focused mainly around increasing ease of use of the program, notably error messages. Now if someone sets the array live and there are no images to process it notifies the user and makes the array offline. Overall today was very productive, we will be continuing similar work tomorrow, and also start testing some alternate configurations generated in Maya.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

13 Fixing features

Great news! Today our lab collaboratively finished our outline. Elizabeth and I were also able to complete many minor fixes to features with the Multi-Camera Array application. These features now allow the application to be made full screen or re-sized with a mouse. There are still plenty of features necessary to tweak in order to truly complete the application, however today was a big step towards that.

Monday, August 5, 2013

12 A very special day

Today is my Birthday! Kind of, not really at all. So today we went forward with tweaking the processing and adding new features to the application. We also found out our algorithm works just as fast on color images from the pi cams.

This the afternoon I took part in Mia and Simran's experiment. It was neat-o. Overall a very solid day accompanied by free lunch.

Friday, August 2, 2013

10 + 11 Getting ready to present | Presentation

(Yesterday) Today we prepared for the presentation on Friday.  We spent the afternoon reviewing and revising our presentation and which parts each of us would be presenting.

Actually today we presented at the Undergraduate Symposium! It went surprisingly well and after the fact a guy who works at a security company talked to us about the potential uses of our system.

Lots of free food and mountain dew today. Good day(s).