Version 3

Owned by Priya Jakhar
Aug 04, 2022
3 min read

V3.0

The main update for this version was inclusion of SONYCamera script for capturing images. User is provided with 4 input fields:

  • Distance between rows of pots in cm

  • Distance between pots in a row in cm (column of pots)

  • Total number of rows of pots available

  • Total number of pots per row (columns of pots)

All fields have validations to only allow numbers (integers). The fields also have a check that doesn’t allow user to leave them empty.

  1. User needs to first click on ‘START’ to power up the MachineMotion.

  2. Then user inputs the data in the 4 fields.

  3. Once they are ready to begin the process of image collection, user clicks on ‘Start Data Collection’.

  4. The camera clicks a picture at the starting position, then the camera plate moves over to the next pot and then next picture is clicked.

  5. This way the camera is positioned over the pots in a row and pictures are clicked, once at the end, the camera plate moves towards the home position.

  6. After camera plate comes back to origin position, the BenchBot moves over to the next row of pots and repeats the earlier process (4-5).

  7. Once the BenchBot has covered all the rows of pots, the user can click on ‘STOP’ button to turn off the MachineMotion.

V3.1

This updated version automates most of the process and includes lesser user required inputs. There is an excel named “weeds.xlsx” which lives in the same directory as the GUI script. This excel has 2 columns, first includes the name of the species according to the row of pots they are present in and the second column includes the number of pictures the user wants to collect over the row of that species.

Automation based on inclusion of the excel sheet saves the user the trouble of providing less frequently changing information over and over again. Because most of the information is utilized from this sheet, the only input available for user to put in the GUI is the distance between the rows of pots because that can be more variable than other pieces of information.

  1. User first needs to click on ‘START’ to power up the MachineMotion.

  2. Then user provides the distance between rows of pots in the input text field.

  3. Once user is ready to begin, they can click on ‘Begin Data Collection’.

  4. The camera clicks a picture at the starting position, then the camera plate moves over to the next pot and next picture is clicked.

  5. The number of pictures to be clicked for each row of pots is information extracted from the “weeds” sheet. Number of row entries in the sheet decides how many times the Benchbot moves to cover all pots.

  6. Once the BenchBot has covered all the rows of pots, the user can click on ‘STOP’ button to turn off the MachineMotion.