PS70: Intro to Digital Fabrication

<div class="textcontainer"> <h3>Week 9: Radio, WiFi, Bluetooth (IoT)</h3> <h4>Assignment: Connect Something to a Network</h4> Documentation: <pre class="margin"> This week was networking, and since my final project involved a camera, I integrated it in. My ESPS3 Camera with an OV3660 would send the livestream over the internet to the computer, then as a button is pressed on a C3, then a still would be taken from the camera stream. Then, the image would be processed through my Gemini API and Spotify API to return a song that matches the image. There were a few issues I stumbled into this week that were heavily related to the networking end. First of all, I had to program two different arduino boards, and I set them all up on the same Wifi so that each of them could send and receive signals to one another. I struggled particularly with getting the computer to integrate connections to both, receiving button inputs from C3 and camera from S3. When I get the thermal printer, I anticipate that I will have similar trouble then sending the processed QR code back from my computer to the board which I have connected to the printer. Overall, it was really valuable to struggle through the networking, discovering the different ways that these devices communicate. Eventually, I got the pipeline down from button to camera to computer to Gemini to Spotify to QR code. The photos below show a bit of the camera setup and process, including some of the behind the scenes information from the serial monitor reading from the C3. </pre> CAMERA SETUP <img src="./Camera Setup.png" alt="Camera Setup" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto;"> CAMERA VIEW <img src="./Camera View.png" alt="Camera View" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto;"> NETWORK PROCESS <video src="./Network Process.MOV" controls style="max-width: 100%;"></video> Documentation: <pre class="margin"> The network process video above shows what happens end-to-end when a capture is requested. The camera is already live streaming on the local network, and the Python server is running and waiting for a trigger, which is the button that I wired up. When the button is pressed on the C3, it sends a GET request to the /trigger endpoint on the computer, and the server grabs a frame from the camera stream, passes it through the Gemini API and then the Spotify API, and then it finally generates a QR code that pops up in the browser. All of this happens only if everything is on the same WiFi network. The videos and setup above are pretty comprehensive, but I kept running into all sorts of issues this week with my buttons, since I have two different types. I wanted to do a Pullup, but I had a button that I had wired to always be High, which would only work with a Pulldown format. Now, I have figured it out, and below is a video of the verbose state tracking that I had Arduino and my website do. There are very clear visual indicators when there is a photo that is captured, and also I have a reset button, which was inspired by some comments I got during the design review. It will make it easier for me to have a photo taken, then block another photo from being taken until the previous one is reset out of the camera. This way, I can guarantee that the right song is printed, since I was getting a lot of server overlap with rapid button presses that was messing up the flow of the project. </pre> DUAL BUTTON <video src="./Dual Button.MOV" controls style="max-width: 100%;"></video> </div>