Simple Robot With Computer Vision And Python

if you are here for long enough you may remember this project the original follow bot made back in 2015. back then it was real challenge for me to create this thing it was made with arduino bluetooth module and android app based on opencv it was it was fun to create this thing very recently got mike's cpa development board something completely new made by seed studio and you can program this thing in python programming language that i'm trying to learn right now based on what you can read on the website it should be great for artificial intelligence machine learning and computer vision in this video will focus on the last one computer vision and will try to create more advanced version of the follow bot in order to start with this board had to read few examples and little bit of the documentation of this board the blob detection was actually fairly easy to do thanks to examples and tools built into the ide and after that just had to find the biggest of the detected blobs with simple while loop and an if statement after all of that had working prototype of my program that was successfully tracking red objects after easily creating the computer vision part of this project started working on simple pun and tilt mechanism that wanted to add to the follow bot and as it turned out there is no such thing as servo library for the mic cpat so had to create something like server library on my own fortunately it's really not hard to control servo motors because you can do it easily with 50hz pwm signal length of high signal should be between 1 and 2 milliseconds in order to control the servo properly so that's duty between five and ten percent and because recently got really useful tool an oscilloscope can show you how this signal exactly looks like and can check myself if it's actually correct for this servo motor i'm still learning how to use an oscilloscope i'm not really good at this yet and this scope is definitely not the best you can buy really crazy and super expensive oscilloscopes but if you want to see something like this on my channel how to use oscilloscopes or something like this let me know in the comments when one server was working properly added another one and because wasn't able to find any good pan and tilt mechanism on thingiverse decided to design my own infusion 360. also went through few iterations of case design for my ex screen and camera after combining all of that together got something like this it's really promising now it was time for the hard part not technically but emotionally had to disassemble the old version of the follow bot made back in 2015 as you can see on my diy pcb really don't like doing stuff like this this pcb was made at home by me etched it at home using diy method stuff like this but right now produce all of my pcbs at jlcpcb.com so we can smoothly move to the sponsor message jlcpcb is perfect manufacturer if you are just starting with pcb design or if you want to order small batch production like recently did for initials clean and easy to navigate website gerber viewer and awesome pricing is something that distinguishes them from the market recently ordered four layer pcb from jlc pcb but that's secret project so can't show you any more than that there are two additional layers hidden inside the pcb and if you need such pcb prices start at just five dollars for four layers pcb there is link to jlcpcb.com in the description go check them out because they are really awesome thanks all for sponsoring jlcpcb and now back to this sad disassembly of my old project after some thinking decided am not really disassembling it it's just big general renovation with replacement of most of the parts with such attitude was happy to start upgrading my old project it had collected some dust over the earth so decided to take it apart and clean it added dc motor driver and connected it to the main board with few cables soldered to it headers would take too much space so decided to solder directly to the max board don't have schematic for that but on my github you can read more about the connection then it was time to put all of that together and attach to the chassis also bought set of two foam tennis balls one will be perfect for the robot and the other one can save your keyboard when you can't fix the back in the code after some final touches and little bit more hot glue applied with technique that you definitely shouldn't try at home it was ready for the final test wow well it wasn't working like this right from the beginning because had to modify some values and tweaks some constants and stuff like this but generally this project was pretty smooth maybe because of the documentation that in my opinion isn't perfect but there is lot of examples and you can figure out how stuff works this project is definitely not something that would recommend for beginner to make like if you are just starting this is not the project you should start with you should start with something easier but if you have little bit of experience with programming with electronics you should definitely make it because it's really fun if you also think that this project was fun consider subscribing to my channel to see more stuff like this in the future if you want to ask any question leave that all in the comments don't forget to like and everything and check out my patreon now that is happening right there because share everything that design for free on the internet so there is not world can put on patreon but sometimes do put something on patreon so check out my patreon would really appreciate support thanks lot to you for watching and to jlcpcb for support happy making bye there is just one more thing to do