I have developed something interesting for my graduate class in Computations Photography for the final project. As background, for the class we had an assignment in which we used the Microsoft Photosynth service to generate a 3D walk thru of an area by uploading several hundred photographs. On the back-end the Photosynth web service does feature extraction on all the photos and then related the photos in three dimensions to each other and the feature points. This generated a point cloud of related points between the photos.

I’m live with the Lets Encrypt certificates for the blog.mcgarrah.org website. This has been awhile in the making and I’m kind of excited. I’m on a legacy environment with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS so part of the process is manual but certificate update just happens nicely. Updating the Apache config files has a little bit of effort but nothing too bad.

Artificial Intelligence for Robotics (CS8803-001)

Associated with Georgia Institute of Technology

Fall Semester 2015

The goal for the final project in CS6475 AI for Robotics was to create a robotic platform to investigate computer vision technology. The platform included an Arduino with sensors and motors and a Raspberry Pi 2 for the vision and primary control system. The project URL is a video channel that shows the progress and challenges.

For an assignment in my robotics class, I need to have an autonomous system react to the environment around it. Reacting can be as simple as flashing a LED if a sensor detects a change.

I have two objectives for the Raspberry Pi 2 (RasPi2) and those are to take a picture using the 5mp webcam and flash a LED. I could use the standard GPIO pins and setup a separate LED but noticed we have two perfectly good LEDs built into the board.

Reading on these built-in LED did not elicit any clear way of interacting with them from the regular Linux documentation. I informally called them the Red Power and Green DiskIO LEDs. It was by reading the headers to the source for Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2 that I found the GPIO pinouts for these two LEDs. They are:

35 Red Power LED
47 Yellow DiskIO LED