Week of 2/11

Not a whole lot of progress this week. Kinda getting our feet wet with implementation.  We decided to go ahead and use Qt for our GUI design.  I installed Qt and the Qt add-in for VS on one of our project machines.  We then rebuilt the solution as a Qt application.  However, we wanted to keep an MVC architecture, and with the tabbed window of our GUI (using QtTabWidget), we wanted to separate the tabs into classes.  Tyler looked into it and found a way to do it, but it requires hand-coding rather than using a GUI designer.  We decided that this would be the approach we would take.

I have been working on some early implementation of the calibration methods, slowed by not being very fluent in C++.  I ran into circular dependency, but did find a workaround using forward class declaration.  We found code for doing the camera calibration using C++ online rather than in the C implementation of OpenCV but wanted to confirm using it with Dr. Wolff.  Either way we would basically be copying the fundamentals, but the whole process is provided by the LearningOpenCV book.  The C++ will be much cleaner, especially as we don't have to allocate space for pointers but can rather add to vectors.  [Unfortunately the updated LearningOpenCV book won't be available until June].

Grady has been working on the motor process.  He had some hangups with getting it spinning again but went to some old code and resolved the issue.  He also has run into a COM1 error for the parallel port, but since it doesn't cause any errors, it may be difficult to troubleshoot.

Tyler is planning on doing the main GUI design in Qt this weekend.  Hopefully next week we can continue the intrinsic calibration process and hookup the views so we can more easily determine what we can code (it is more difficult when you don't have all the classes yet).

Also, Tyler installed Windows and VS 2010 on the third machine.  This will make it easier as a whole so we all can be developing on similar stations (rather than Ubuntu or having to bring in a laptop).

We were planning on meeting with Dr. Wolff today, but by the time we finally got to his office (4:30), he was already gone.  It's early in the semester and there wasn't a ton of stuff to really talk about (well, sometimes it comes about anyways and the meeting still lasts a while :)

Anyways, we will definitely plan on meeting with Dr. Wolff next Thursday and on a more regular schedule from then on.

Cheers.  Happy President's Day.