Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and I feel good about my progress this week. Let’s get Started!
Last week, I had successfully confirmed OpenCV was installed on my Raspberry Pi. The first thing to do this week was to start coding just as soon as I figure out a way to save a program file within the virtual environment, right?
Not quite. I thought a virtual environment was kind of like a virtual machine, where it has a whole little computer running within your computer, only with a few less restrictions. I still think that, but it turns out it works just fine if I run a file within the virtual environment from the Desktop or anywhere else.
I also learned exactly what a bash script is. So, I had OpenCV working in a script, and I changed permissions so I could run a .py file from the command line, but when i went to run it, I got an error about import not being supported. It turns out I forgot to run the Python interpreter with my program as an argument. That detail got me into the workshop I sometimes mention.
I actually got my base coding test harness from the YouTube Channel CodingEntrepreneurs. (Link to their first OpenCV Python video) While I was at the workshop, I learned a bunch of tangential stuff like when to pack your Python power cord, I polished off my knowledge on how to make sure a substitute power supply is acceptable, and when it’s a good idea to go back to the tutorial instead of arbitrarily placing a missing closing parenthesis.
In the end, I feel like I had a very successful session, but since then I’ve been building a framework for my program as a whole. Hopefully, by next week, I will have a program that will look at a series of pictures, tell if the background in each of three zones (cupboard, counters, and cabinets) is occluded (blocked) by a moving object (a cat or human), and sound the alarm if it sees something in the counters’ zone. As a bonus, it can save a picture of the culprit for if/when I try my coding skills at training a neural net to tell if my cat is being naughty.
Final Question: When was the last time you caught yourself considering over complicating a plan?