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In this lab, your objective will be to design and build a two axis gimbal mount for your USB camera, which you will use in coordination with the openCV computer vision package to track human faces.
The main task will be to design your own mount from scratch. It is recommended to use the lasercutter given the short time available, but some 3d printing is acceptable as well.
It is also recommended that before starting your design you conduct a search on the internet, thingverse and other online resources that might show example designs. Our servo motors are standard micro servos and we have different disks and levers we can attach to MDF and wood.
Its is more important that we have something working compared to have a perfect design. Every product goes though many iterations until its ready for the consumers. We would like you to practice the design tools you were introduced to.
By putting two servos at 90 degrees to each other, you should be able to use the servos to point the camera in any direction in Altitude (shown in blue here) and Azimuth (in green).
If you run the built-in openCV face capture code, it will tell you the location in the field-of-view of any faces, and you can use this data to drive the motors to put that face at the center of the image.
The most difficult part of this will be the mechanical design, so that should be your first priority. In parallel, you should ensure that the openCV libraries and examples are properly installed.
The following Thing shows in simple terms how one could create a two axis gimbal mount
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:71492
A good resource is also instructables: http://www.instructables.com/
We will discuss the following paper in class: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Build-your-Everything-Really-Really-Fast/
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