Looking good, so far...

We have been busy with the project, and haven't had time for blogging, sorry about that :/ I'll try to explain progress we have made last week. Lot's of pic's :)

So far we have been soldering tiny led's to make the IR-beacon to track with camera. There were some problems, that we solved (at least most of them.. :D ) or got around them. Here are some pictures to explain what we have been doing.

Our bigger IR-led with soldering pads up
compared to abico connector.

Tatumi soldering led's. Helping hand's were really usefull,
altough attaching such small led was challenging.

Three soldering pads of our smaller led.
Yup, third pad broke off, so that led is useless.

Also one of our power led's broke into two pieces while we were attaching
them to piece of paperboard. It's starting to look like we have to
order some led's soon..

Tatumi soldered the remaining power led and we inserted
it into ping pong ball. Goal was to have ping pong ball as
a big IR-glowing target to track. Led and ball touched,
and now there is a hole in the ball.

Led got bit plastic on it when touching the ball. Also solder
got broken. Quick re-solder and led worked again. Firstly bit smoke
came from it, but now it's still working.

Also we have broken all the camera lenses (actually just the infrared filter on the back, having a IR-filter that block's IR from the camera makes tracking of IR kinda hard...)

Freshly broken IR-filter. Next step is to remove the pieces and
add visible light filter, so the camera can't see anything else
than IR. Pretty decent visible light filter can be made from
old floppy disk.

Now we have all the basic things ready to be connected and system ready for test.

First test of system. Cameras can see our IR-led, and also track them.

Some adjustments are needed, but basic tracking on one camera is working now.

Before further tests's, we marked our stage edges and few
coordinates for calibration.

Then we installed cameras to three point's across the stage.
One on downstage left, one downstage right and one upstage left.

Tatumi dancing with our Beacon v1. Also on the image are both of our
downstage cameras.

Paavo starting calibration process.

Calibration process didn't work, because we had no tag.
We thought it's not needed, but apparently it is. So, we made
Beacon v2 by disassembling one of our cameras (upstage one)
and letting it to control IR-led.

There is our wifi card, connected to MacBook for power, and
to breadboard for controlling the led. Led gets power from the
battery pack. There is also transistor used as a switch.

With Beacon v2 we were able to do the calibration.

We made some additions for the Beacon (another transistor, battery power) to make it more portable and easier to move around. Also we got the system to tell us coordinates of Beacon as it was moved around stage.

Hopefully this opened what we have made this far, there is still lot to come ;) Next week we should have more LED's and couple of new wifi cards. With them we should be able to make more beacon's. Also tracking things with light might happen next week :o

We'll meet within week with next post!

- Jani