Yesterday we completed the overview for the blink guide, and ran the python program to bring the sheet to html. Today we posted the html to the page, and now the first blink guide is viewable here. Go check it out!
In addition to this, the build series page was added. It serves as a table of contents for a solo Bowie build. As you can see, it’s not complete yet, and there’s still a ways to go.
We made the images for the first blink guide. This update seems tiny, but it plays a big part in that guide.
![Collab Log #010: [VIDEO] Water bottle detected! (in IR)](https://www.robotmissions.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/IMG_20200311_211935-1080x675.jpg)
There was a good amount of progress that culminated this week!The uOttawa group got Tensorflow object detection working with the IR camera attached to the RPi! We were able to see what the objects were being detected as. This was just using the standard MobileNet model, and there were results such as surfboard in there too.
Beck completed the Bowie Brain Kit! It is now completely soldered. Next step is programming the first blink! As well, we had the chance to meet someone new, Queenie, who was interested in learning more about Robot Missions.
Hooray! It’s great to see it when progress meets a milestone. Congrats to the uOttawa team!
With the progress of the build guides coming along, today we took a pause to figure out how all of those pieces would fit together into a series. The result of this brainstorming session was seeing that there will likely need to be three series: a solo Bowie build (for makers building it on their own), a team Bowie build, and an educational group Bowie build. The edu build would be broken into phases, as seen. It looks simple, but there was a lot of erasing and re-writing while figuring this out on the whiteboards.
There was a bit of a problem being encountered after the Bowie rebuild. The XBees couldn’t communicate together. At first we were concerned this was going to be a hardware issue … that would be expensive parts. Alright, time to dive in to figuring out the bug.
First step was to see if any of the Xbees were receiving any data. Oh yeah, remember one of the previous issues with FTDI? This answer helped to fix the problem (from what we’ve seen, so far, until perhaps it will break again..).
Phew! What a relief! They were receiving data! Must be a code issue then. And wow, was it a code issue indeed. Meaning, there were sections of the code completely missing. The communications on that serial port were just vanished. What on earth! Well, anyway, we re-added it, and it was a huge relief to see the RSSI led from the XBee light up and to see Bowie move again, controlled by the Operator Interface.
