Snakes on a Car: Or, Over-engineering a Toy

A presentation at PyATL in July 2020 in by Kat Cosgrove

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SNAKES ON A CAR OR: Overengineering a Toy

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Kat Cosgrove Developer Advocate @ JFrog Twitter: Dixie3Flatline Shownotes: https://bit.ly/PyAtlJFrog

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So, what’s this demo?

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Building the Basic Car

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Donkey Cars ● ● ● ● ● ● ● About $250 in Parts R/C Car Raspberry Pi 3B Pi Camera Battery Bank Train it Race it!

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Swapping the Controls

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The Driver’s Seat

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● Managed by Intel NUC ● Sanic webserver ● VueJS frontend ● ZMQ Proxy ○ CI/CD ○ Racewheel data ○ Steering and Throttle ○ Image feed

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Adding Virtual Scenery

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Read frame Convert to HSV Define HSV range Create mask from range Crop background Merge them! But wait…

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● 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

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Automating Training

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That’s it! Your Speaker Twitter Kat Cosgrove Dixie3Flatline Win a Switch Credits bit.ly/PyAtlJFrog Freepik and Flaticon