Student Biography
I am a senior at CSU Channel Islands that is majoring in Computer Science and aiming to receive a B.S. Computer Science Fall 2022. I transferred from Santa Barbara City College about two years ago with an A.S. Computer Science and A.S. Mathematics. Some of my hobbies include playing and watching baseball, playing video games, cooking at home and trying different recipes, watching animated art forms such as pixel art and japanese anmimation, learning about outer space and our earth, and so much more. The recent activity from NASA and other parts of the space program reignited my dream that humanity can hopefully one day inhabit multiple galaxies in harmony. This excitement of mine influenced my decision when choosing a Capstone project towards embedded systems.
Project Background
The aim of my project was to write firmware for an OV7670 Camera Chip that allowed it to interface with an Arduino MKR Wifi 1010 in order to utilize the camera with any desired configuration settings. The purpose for this was to enrich myself with experience and knowledge regarding embedded systems and to prepare me for a career path where there are potentially dozens of interconnected systems and also to understand more deeply the inner working of hardware components such as miccrocontrollers via technical documents such as data sheets and schematics.
Reasoning
I must clarify something important first. Initially, the aim of my project was not to write firmware for a camera chip. Instead I wanted to create an autonomous plant habitat that would regulate the temperature within by utilizing various embedded systems within it. These systems would serve a variety of purposes: a temperature sensor to read temperature, a camera chip to periodically record plant via image captures and a heater system which would activate based on sensor readings. I believed that this project would assist my experience and widen my field of understanding by introducing me to concepts like 3D-Printing, Computer Aided Design and Integrated Circuits alongside electric engineering.
At the beginning of the semester, equipped with the initial plan of my project, I decided to start with the physical habitat design portion of the project. I successfully learned to use Fusion 360 CAD Modeling software and even managed to slice my models using Ultimaker Cura and printed them out via an Ender 3 v2 Neo. All thse thing being stuff that I had never come close to doing before.
Feeling confident on my progress I also connected the hardware components and wrote software for the temperature readings successfully. That is when I decided to move on to the camera chip. However this was when the aim of my project radically changed. I was having a great deal of difficulty understanding the best way to approach the integration of the camera chip onto my system. Upon meeting with my advisor and discussing the size and sheer difficulty and scope of my project I ultimately decided that if I really wanted to learn more about embedded systems then cutting down on the size of the project and just writing firmware for a camera chip would more than suffice in both difficulty and knowledge to gain.
Write-Up & Poster
Click Here To View Digital Write-Up
Click Here To View Digital Poster
P.S.: You can comment in either the write-up or poster
Acknowledgement
I want to thank and recognize Dr.Feister, my advisor. His rich amount of experience working with camera chips and other imaging embedded systems was essential to how far I was able to reach with the objectives I set for myself.