S18: Spybot

Grading Criteria

• How well is Software & Hardware Design described?
• How well can this report be used to reproduce this project?
• Code Quality
• Overall Report Quality:
  • Software Block Diagrams
  • Hardware Block Diagrams

    Schematic Quality

  • Quality of technical challenges and solutions adopted.

Project Title

Spybot

Abstract

The team will develop a RC car driven remotely with an Android smartphone. The RC car will be equipped with a camera to provide real-time visual feedback to the smartphone. The camera will also be mounted on a servo to add the capability to change the camera angle. The SJOne will be used to drive the motor and servo of the car in addition to the camera’s servo. The Android smartphone will communicate with the SJOne using Bluetooth. The Android smartphone will be used to command the SJOne and drive the car and motorized camera. The RaspberryPi will stream visual data to the Android smartphone.

Objectives & Introduction

Show list of your objectives. This section includes the high level details of your project. You can write about the various sensors or peripherals you used to get your project completed.

Team Members & Responsibilities

• YuYu Chen
  • Android app & bluetooth communication
• Jason Tran
  • PCB design & RC car firmware
• Sophia Quan
  • Servo camera mount and camera integration
• Andrew Javier
  • Camera integration
• Jeremy Chau
  • Camera integration

Schedule

Week#	Date	Task	Status
1	04/15/2018	Able to communicate with Bluetooth module on MCU by end of the week	Completed
2	04/22/2018	Start on Android application and have UI finished by end of week Research possible ways to display live video feed in Android application	Completed
3	04/29/2018	Establish Bluetooth communication with Android App and MCU Start PCB design Start on motor and servo(s) controller Install MotionEyeOS and get familiar with the UI	Completed
4	05/06/2018	Test Android app communication with RC car Test RPi Camera with MotionEyeOS on multiple devices Get camera servo up and running by end of week	Completed
5	05/13/2018	System Integration and testing	Completed
6	05/20/2018	System testing	Completed

Parts List & Cost

Quantity	Vendor	Item	Price
1	San Jose State University	SJ One Board	$80.00
1	Adafruit	Raspberry Pi Zero W Camera Pack	$44.95
1	Traxxas	Traxxas Stampede: Monster Truck	$199.95
1	ITead	BTBee Pro	$12.50
1	SparkFun	Servo Camera Mount	$6.50
Total			$337.37

Design & Implementation

The design section can go over your hardware and software design. Organize this section using sub-sections that go over your design and implementation.

Hardware Design

There are various connections to the SJOne Board in the project. To deal with the steering of the car, two different PWM pins are connected to the car: one for the motor and one for the servo. The camera servo also requires two connections to the PWM pins of the SJOne Board: one for the tilt and one for the horizontal movements. The VL53L0X time of flight sensor sends data through the I2C bus to the SJOne Board and requires a connection for the data and another for the clock. The sensor also connects to a general purpose output pin for its shutdown pin. To connect to the mobile phone, an XBEE Bluetooth module was placed on the board and it communicates with the microprocessor via UART. Finally, the mobile phone connects to the Raspberry Pi Zero W and camera through a hotspot connection.

Hardware Interface

In this section, you can describe how your hardware communicates, such as which BUSes used. You can discuss your driver implementation here, such that the Software Design section is isolated to talk about high level workings rather than inner working of your project.

Pin Connectivity Table

Item	Pin Usage	Port.Pin	Direction	Peripheral	Peripheral Port
1	PWM	P2.0	Output	SJ One Board	Car Motor
2	PWM	P2.1	Output	SJ One Board	Car Servo
3	PWM	P2.2	Output	SJ One Board	Camera Servo Tilt
4	PWM	P2.3	Output	SJ One Board	Camera Servo Horizontal
5	I2C	SDA2	Bidirectional	SJ One Board	VL53L0X SDA
6	I2C	SCL	Bidirectional	SJ One Board	VL53L0X SCL
7	GPIO	P0.29	Output	SJ One Board	VL53L0X Shutdown
8	UART2	-	Bidirectional	SJ One Board	XBEE Bluetooth

PWM

Something Something

I2C

The VL53L0X time of flight sensor connects to the SJOne Board through the I2C Bus. The SDA and SCL signals are connected to the SDA2 and SCL2 pins on the SJOne Board, respectively. In addition, the shutdown pin is connected to P0.29 which is used as an output with the GPIO functionality of the microprocessor.

UART2

Something Something

Software Design

Show your software design. For example, if you are designing an MP3 Player, show the tasks that you are using, and what they are doing at a high level. Do not show the details of the code. For example, do not show exact code, but you may show psuedocode and fragments of code. Keep in mind that you are showing DESIGN of your software, not the inner workings of it.

Implementation

This section includes implementation, but again, not the details, just the high level. For example, you can list the steps it takes to communicate over a sensor, or the steps needed to write a page of memory onto SPI Flash. You can include sub-sections for each of your component implementation.

Servo Motor

The servo motor is used as a camera mount for the Raspberry Pi camera. It uses a PWM signal and the percentage of how much the servo should pan or tilt is supplied by the Android application

Android Application

The main purpose of the Android application is to provide a simple user interface that allows the user to control the RC car. The user interface mimics what existing game consoles/controllers look like.

game controller

Spybot UI

The Android app will provide:

• Steer the RC car left and right
• Drive the RC car forward and backwards
• Control servo tilt and pan orientation

The Android app will display:

• Live video feed from camera
• Current orientation of joystick
• Percentage of horizontal orientation
• Percentage of vertical orientation
• Speed of RC car in percentage
• Distance in millimeter from Time-of-Flight sensor

Software Design

High Level Architecture Design

Testing & Technical Challenges

Describe the challenges of your project. What advise would you give yourself or someone else if your project can be started from scratch again? Make a smooth transition to testing section and described what it took to test your project.

Include sub-sections that list out a problem and solution, such as:

<Bug/issue name>

Discuss the issue and resolution.

Raspberry Pi Camera Ribbon

The ribbon used for the camera to communicate with the RPi is very sensitive. While testing out the camera and its settings, the video feed would cut out a lot when the ribbon was disturbed. There were times when the camera would not be detected at all. To remedy this issue, the connection was gently redone until the video feed returned.

Connecting to the Pi Zero W

Initially, the group wanted to have the phone to connect to the Raspberry Pi through Wi-Fi. However, when setting up the Pi to be a Wi-Fi host, the phones could not discover the Pi making communication impossible. Furthermore, it did not allow the Pi to initially boot up properly. To rectify this problem, the group decided to have the mobile phone with the application be a hotspot host. While this means that the Pi would have to be reconfigured every time it wants to connect to a new phone, the results would be consistent with the feed from the camera being able to broadcast to the host phone.

Conclusion

Conclude your project here. You can recap your testing and problems. You should address the "so what" part here to indicate what you ultimately learnt from this project. How has this project increased your knowledge?

Project Video

Upload a video of your project and post the link here.

Project Source Code

• Sourceforge Source Code Link

References

Acknowledgement

• Preetpal Kang
• Khalil Estell

References Used

List any references used in project.

• MotionEyeOS Source Code

Appendix

You can list the references you used.