RemotePiCam

Professors at Calvin University find themselves adjusting the live camera during class. We have attempted to solve this problem by creating a moving platform that points a mounted camera.

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Inspiration

While teaching a professor may move around and end up being out of frame

What it does

The RemotePiCam is a moving platform with a mounted camera which uses math and an image stream to ensure that the platform is always oriented towards the face in in front of it

How we built it

We used a Raspberry Pi 3b with 2 PWM Servos, an ArduCAM, and some duck tape.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was when we found out that the bandwidth and latency constraints on uploading an image stream to an MQTT broker prevented us from obtaining a usable system. To solve this problem we switched from uploading images to the broker to uploading small bounding box coordinates.

We also ran into problems tuning the product so that it behaved the way we wanted it to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how well we have tuned the product. It is very accurate

What we learned

We learned that tuning takes time, and became much more familiar with python virtual environments.

What's next for RemotePiCam

Up next for the RemotePiCam is to add interactiveability so that a user can use the product as a remote laser pointer.

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