Week 13: Software Configuration and Testing

For hardware construction: A simple camera holder was built to mount the camera with tripod.

For software construction: In these two weeks, we tried to embed the Roomba driving control and python audio into our detector code. Because of the port issue, we were not able to connect the Roomba to our original Linux VW. Therefore, we switched to other computers and platforms. The following are the platforms/computers that we tried and the reason why they were not able to complete our project goals. There are three major functions we are looking at: 

1. Can it run the mask detecor.py?

2. Can it install/support PyAudio?

3. Can it access Roomba's USB port and control the robot?

Table 1. System configuration and issues

Platform Name	What it supports	What it does not support	Why?
VMWare Linux VM	Mask detector, PyAudio	Roomba driving control	USB port could not be opened
Raspberry Pi	Roomba driving control	PyAudio, Mask detector	"Arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc" failed with exit status 1; Python version.
CONDA Jupiter	To be tested	The terminal was removed from the software and need to be redownloaded	The system upgrade removes the terminal from its windows
Mac PyCharm	Roomba driving control, (mask detector)	PyAudio	Command errored out with exit status 1
Virtue box ubuntu	PyAudio	Mask Detector	python version not support
Linux DUO system	To be tested	To be tested	To be tested

We also programmed the Roomba driving control following Dr. Byung-Cheo Min's lecture slide - Programmable Robot System II, and the PyAudio speech assistant by Brad Traversy. 

WHAT IS NEXT: 

• As installing the PyAudio package is a major issue in most platforms (error message see below), and we tried troubleshooting that is available online, if it is still not working by the end of this week, we should consider abandon the voice assistant and use Roomba audio instead. 
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• If we could fix the port issue for our VM (which should be the easiest approach), we can combine our driving control with the detector and the speaking program. If not, either the Linux DUO system or Pycharm will be an alternative way.
• We need to do multiple testing to calculate the time for the robot to move from one point to the other and the distance for it to move forward if people are not wearing the mask. 
• Combine all the functions into one single python file and test it!
• Preparing for the project presentation next Thursday.

References: 

1. alexis_speech_assistant by Brad Traversy (https://github.com/bradtraversy/alexis_speech_assistant)
2. Programmable Robot System II. pdf by Dr. Byung-Cheo Min