A presentation at PyATL by Kat Cosgrove
SNAKES ON A CAR OR: Overengineering a Toy
Kat Cosgrove Developer Advocate @ JFrog Twitter: Dixie3Flatline Shownotes: https://bit.ly/PyAtlJFrog
So, what’s this demo?
Building the Basic Car
Donkey Cars ● ● ● ● ● ● ● About $250 in Parts R/C Car Raspberry Pi 3B Pi Camera Battery Bank Train it Race it!
Swapping the Controls
The Driver’s Seat
● Managed by Intel NUC ● Sanic webserver ● VueJS frontend ● ZMQ Proxy ○ CI/CD ○ Racewheel data ○ Steering and Throttle ○ Image feed
Adding Virtual Scenery
Read frame Convert to HSV Define HSV range Create mask from range Crop background Merge them! But wait…
● Actually super disorienting with a static background ● Angle of steering used to calculate how far to move crop position vs previous frame ● scale variable to change perceived speed of panning
Automating Training
That’s it! Your Speaker Twitter Kat Cosgrove Dixie3Flatline Win a Switch Credits bit.ly/PyAtlJFrog Freepik and Flaticon
Like a lot of engineers, I like to tinker. I also like hardware hacking, video games, and over-engineering the hell out of something. When my team at work decided to build a proof of concept demonstrating the possibility of fast over-the-air updates for edge devices, we settled on using a car as the example of an edge device. It’s flashy, you know? This also presented me with an opportunity to do all of the things I love, and call it work: build a self-driving RC car, and then let people race it around a track using a repurposed USB racewheel, a handful of open source tools, and whole lotta Python. DevOps, but make it fun.
for free. You
can too.