Lost Newbie has Returned: ArUco Detection Edition

That’s great!! :slight_smile:

Ok gotcha.
I think I’d want to break this down into even smaller steps.

  1. Take a photo of litterally anything with your camera and Picam2 and then save it to disk or throw it on the screen. (could be your cat, a coffee machine, a selfie, whatever).
  2. Detect whether or not an ArUco marker is somewhere in the frame or not. Yes no questions are usually easier to answer. (e.g. print yes to the console if there is an aruco marker).
  3. Detect the position of an ArUco marker in the frame.

Try step 1 above :slight_smile:

My word! :scream:
BIG project. Do you have a time limit on this? :watch:

Ah ok, so the Pi would detect the presence and then a separate arduino would measure the distance. But, you’re hoping to kill two birds with one stone and just use the PI.
Sure, that’s totally possible and your smart. I bet you could get this working eventually :slight_smile:

There is nothing, nothing at all, more exciting than doing something someone told me couldn’t be done.
I also get the purity and focus of a project that does a lot with the fewest number of tools. So satisfying!
Please know that I really resonate with this; I am not here to discourage you.

Ok, with the above having been said, did you professor say that it couldn’t be done, but “meant” that it’s an additional complication that won’t serve your learning journey at this stage?

I’m not saying that is the case, just worth pausing, asking that question, and then moving forward with conviction no matter what you decide.

When I was at Uni I also had professional composers telling me It couldn’t be done. Sometimes, I proved them wrong and grew a lot as a person. Other times, I handed in my unfocused musical composition 3 weeks late and lost 20% on a work that was barely a pass to begin with.

I don’t know which CE video you mean but there content is pretty education friendly so i bet it’s great.

As in live video streaming from a drone??
:warning: DANGER! :warning:
That is always tough and requires a bit of gear to be reliable. Channel 7 is a 1.3billion dollar company for a reason. :stuck_out_tongue:
I’m not saying it’s beyond you, but I would leave this for LAST and treat it as a stretch goal. Just my two cents.


This could be a long project @Caroline269834 :stuck_out_tongue:
Pix :heavy_heart_exclamation:

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I will definitely do this. Thank you so much!

I was given 6 months to make this project come to life, but I already have to finish it all by the end of this month. I’ve taken so long to get to the programming aspect of things since we are required to go through phases. My graduation depends on this project, so there’s been a lot of long nights since I don’t have anyone else to help with programing and such. But I’m so glad to have found this forum, it’s been insanely helpful. I really can’t thank you, and everyone else who has helped here, enough!

He had mentioned that Raspberry Pi’s doesn’t have built-in analog-to-digital conversion capabilities for directly reading analog sensor data so that’s why I would need the Arduino. The video I was referring to was this one, Michael (I hope is his name) made it seem suspiciously easy :rofl: so that’s why I wanted to give it a shot.

Yes, it is quite ambitious! I am very nervous on how unstable the drone will be while it’s hovering. The mechanism is designed for a DJI M600, which has been used for filming but our mechanism isn’t nearly as stable as the camera attachment that the DJI comes with. But those problems are for future Caroline to deal with!

Thank you again for your time, advise and kind words! It’s been nice to be able to have help and encouragement! :people_hugging: I will definitely divide the ArUco detection into smaller bits and work my way up!

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I’ve benefited a lot from this forum too. :slight_smile:

I am going to observe that this deadline is

“ʟɨȶȶʟɛ ɮɨȶ ֆզʊɛɛʐʏ™”

I often have open ended problems with fast deadlines.
I would recommend pulling out a pen a paper and writing, in less than two sentences, an…

MVP : Minimum Viable Product.

I define an MVP as the simplest reduction of my idea that does not compromise the identity of the idea.

“If you could cut a feature and still technically submit your project it’s probably not part of your minimum viable product”

Making an MVP doesn’t mean cutting every feature in your project, it means identifying what is essential to your idea and allocating time towards that first.

For example.
IDEA : Helping locate potential dangers in an environment using ArUco tags.
MVP : A still camera looking into a DIY cardboard doll house that lights up an LED when it detects a “wet floor” sign that contains an ArUco tag.

Maybe you can upscale that to a kitchen with an ArUco tag on hazard items.
Maybe you can stretch this to a drone that can survey the farmland for animal traps.
You just need to have something to submit when the deadline arrives. :slight_smile:


If your MVP can be reduced to ONLY your quote below you are REALLY close.

You’re on the right track.
Keep us posted.

Pix :heavy_heart_exclamation:

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I will definitely look into doing this!!

I’ve tried breaking it down but I still haven’t gotten any results. I keep getting this:

QObject::moveToThread: Current thread (0x7f6c02f960) is not the object’s thread (0x7f6c1753c0).
Cannot move to target thread (0x7f6c02f960)

qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “/home/cbarreto/env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/cv2/qt/plugins” even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: xcb, eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx.

Aborted

I’ve already tried multiple things to “fix it” but I’ve gotten nowhere. I still have two things left to try, hopefully one of them works :face_exhaling:

Try those few more things. It’s good to spend some time working through problems.

If you’re still stuck after that come back here with an example of how you generated that error. :slight_smile:

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PIIIIX!! I DETECTED A MARKER!! MY FIRST MARKERRRRRR :sob:

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That’s 𝙳𝚈𝙽𝙰𝙼𝙸𝚃𝙴 Caroline! :firecracker:

Must be such a great feeling.
Congratz! :partying_face:

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Yes! :face_holding_back_tears: I even recorded a 5sec video of me moving the marker around and it also detected it! Its so exciting!

I didn’t use picamera2 at all, it worked with cv2 and cv2.aruco. I tried to do a live video recording with cv2.videocapture(0) but it doesn’t work. I was asking Copilot and it brought up something about installing a driver so I was in the middle of doing that and at one point I had to reboot but now it’s not starting back up :sweat_smile:

I was following these instructions since I have an ArduCam camera module 3:
https://docs.arducam.com/Raspberry-Pi-Camera/Pivariety-Camera/Quick-Start-Guide/

And I had no trouble until I got to this other page:

At step #3 is where it died apparently

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Big news! :slight_smile:

Seems like a good time to take pause and assess your assignment criteria and personal goals.

So stoked you got something kicking.

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Congratulations!

Out of interest which Raspberry Pi are you using? I have encountered similar hurdles using Bookworm on my Pi 5

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Thank you!! I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4/B, what problems have you been experiencing??

I wanted to give a bit of an update, I was able to complete the code :face_holding_back_tears: We have a new drone and I was able to negotiate with my professor some new goals like the MVP you had mentioned (thanks to the new drone). Also, turns out that using a webcam instead of the ArduCam makes everything much much easier!

so the newbie isn’t so lost anymore :partying_face:

I’m actually gonna miss messaging through this forum :sob:

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Hey Caroline,

That’s great to hear! I’m so glad your on the right track with this project.

It would be great to see your final project state after so many forum posts so please come back and give us an update when its done.

Congratulations! :partying_face:

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Hurray!

Who knows?
Maybe one day you’ll feel that creative urge to make something bubble inside and you. Perhaps you’ve imagined the perfect present for someone but it doesn’t exist unless you build it yourself, or a possession you love has broken and you can’t bear to throw it away.

I hope working through this project, and interacting with a creative community, has given you the confidence to follow that idea when it arrives

In big art installations you work with lots of amazing people with very different personalities, backgrounds, and styles but they all made it there because of those magic words :

Congratz again!
Pix :heavy_heart_exclamation:

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Hahahaha toooo many forum posts! I’ll definitely be back to post an update

thank you :face_holding_back_tears:

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Thank you so much, Pix!! :sob: Thank you for your support, it really has meant a lot to me

I’ll probably come up with something, I have two camera modules to use :sweat_smile: I need to brainstorm some ideas

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Tragedy has strucken upon us, my dudes. I’ve been trying to connect and program a stepper motor and the linear actuator but I have had a lot of trouble since I’m involving an RC controller so I don’t know if I’m wiring thing incorrectly or its the codes I’m using but anyways that’s a problem for another post. :joy:

I live in an island where power outages are very common. I forgot to unplug my poor raspberry last night and a power outage occurred, I didn’t have enough time to unplug it before the light came back :smiling_face_with_tear: now my raspberry isn’t loading properly. The red light turns on when I power it but when I turn it on, the green light powers up yet it slowly fades away. I’ve tried using different cables, I’ve tried using different microSD cards (since it loads up when I don’t have the SD card in) but I don’t know what else to do. The loading screen flickers and theres lines across the screen also but it never fully loads up.


Is there no hope for this raspberry?

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Hi @Caroline269834, all hopes not lost yet, It’s booting further than a lot of Pi’s I see.

Just want to check if you’ve tried a fresh image of Pi OS on an SD card as well as potentially attempting to update the bootloader.

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I hadn’t but I tried it just now. The green screen came on, the green light flashed steadily and I removed it, ran another SD card with the OS but it’s still acting strange. It loads up completely but the screen still flickers too much for me to do anything, some pixels aren’t right either.
I took a small video of the screen: faultyscreen.zip (3.5 MB)

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It appears the GPU has had a bit of damage. There isn’t any easy fix to this one unfortunately. It will also be hard to assess the extent of damage to other parts of the Pi.

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