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General

Planning Cards – an iOS and a WatchKit App

A few months ago I launched Planning Cards, an app designed to help Agile teams during their backlog refinement sessions. The app is very simple. The premise of the app is that users select a card and tap again to reveal the value to their team. Software engineers working in Agile teams do this very frequently to assign chunks of work value based on development effort. Teams usually use tools such as physical cards which can be limiting, especially if your team isn’t using a standardized point-system or if you forget to bring your card deck to the meeting. I’ve personally used some apps for this purpose but sometimes wanted to use my Apple Watch without having to bring my phone to the meeting. I also wanted custom card decks. Therefore, I decided to develop Planning Cards.

This post is going to be a broad overview of the application. To best understand how the application works feel free to look at the source code, which is available here.

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General

Building a Backend – Testing Endpoints (Part 3 of 3)

Welcome to the last part of my series on how to build an API. In this tutorial I’m going to cover testing your endpoints as an application would be using them. This will provide higher level coverage for our api project and database and is a great way to test the business logic of your endpoints and database.

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General

Building a Backend – API (Part 2 of 3)

In this part of the series I am going to build on what we learned in part 1 of the series by creating a Web API. After this tutorial, we will have endpoints that allow us to create and read data from our database.

In this tutorial we are going to be using Node.js to set up a web server. In addition, we’re going to use the Express.js framework to help us quickly layout our routes. We will also be configuring our project to use Typescript. I will also help you set up your project for unit tests using jest.

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General

Building a Backend – Database (Part 1 of 3)

In this series I am going to be covering how to create a backend from start to finish. I’m going to cover the process in several different sections. For our database we will be using PostgreSQL. I’ll go over all of the steps in detail, including what tools I’m using.

The architecture used in this series is built to be scalable, yet hopefully very simple for beginners. I’ll try my best to explain why I used certain technologies as we go along.

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Car Collision Prevention

Car Collision Prevention Project – Finishing up and Using a RC Car for Testing

Finishing up the car collision project, we will be testing it on a remote control car. Throughout the history of the project, it has taken many turns for the better as we personally find out that many options that we wished we could use were not viable options. One of these is using stereo vision to understand distance to objects in front of the vehicle. We quickly found out this wasn’t a viable option it was very resource intensive to run on the designated device which meant that the rate at which we get updated data is too slow for our application. Our device is going to ideally sit inside of our car shell (if it fits) and going to be able to simple to operate and display some form of a its status using LED indicators.

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Car Collision Prevention

Car Collision Prevention Project – Switching to an Ultrasonic Sensor from Stereo Vision

After calibrating and validating the results of a rectified stereo pair, I found that the Raspberry Pi’s performance isn’t capable of running the script effectively. Running the rectification script on a very small image along with the StereoBM function was taking around 3 seconds to process each frame. This obviously wasn’t ideal since we couldn’t use a computer to do the calculation as it had to portable, so I decided to switch over to using an Arduino with an ultrasonic sensor.

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Car Collision Prevention

Car Collision Prevention Project – Calibrating the Cameras to Be Used with SGBM

In order to get a more accurate depth map, I had to get the matrices for our cameras by calibrating both cameras using a chessboard. Since the relative setup of the cameras will always be constant, the calibration matrices can be saved and used for future parts of the project.

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Car Collision Prevention

Car Collision Prevention Project – Disparity using OpenCV

To get distances to objects, there are one of two options, either use sizes of known objects such as car widths or license plates or use a disparity mapping. I decided to start working on the disparity approach which gives a new image of far and near objects, without an exact distance.

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Car Collision Prevention

Car Collision Prevention Project – Getting a Case to Hold the Cameras

The relative position of the cameras for the car collision project is absolutely essential in order to make sure we aren’t changing the parameters of our setup. In order to keep this factor constant before setup the depth map in our software, I wanted to make sure I had something to hold our cameras together. I was going to create my own holder but saw there was a plethora of available models out online specifically for the c270 camera. I decided to print them all out and give a run down about each one.

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Car Collision Prevention

Car Collision Prevention Project – Overlaying FPS on Top of the Camera Stream

Since performance is critical to the application of our project, I thought it’d be important to log our current sampling frame rate by writing on top of the window.

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