I am building a sensor system that I will be adding to the head of a palletizing robot. It has two laser sensors. One faces downwards (which I use to collect distances from bucket lids below). The ONE I AM CONCERNED WITH faces outwards. A small distance away from the bucket, the robot head dips below bucket lid heighth, and slowly scans upwards while the laser sensor collects 100 distance measurements. (I don't think I can take any more readings/faster without cutting my intra- OFF/ON/OFF/READ delays below 3 ms. Don't know if that is too short for my arduino and laser to talk to one another lol.)
MY GOAL is to determine if the bucket lid is seated properly/deep enough. If it is low enough on the bucket, then I know for sure it is sealed. Various reasons for the lid being too high. For example, sometimes there are two rubber gaskets in the lid, and the lid-presser-thing on the automated bucket line squishes it down, but the lid cannot seal. An unsealed or double gasketed bucket sneaks past the mechanical "Is there a lid on the bucket" sensor, but we dont know if they are truly sealed.
MORE SPECIFICALLY, as you are concerned I am looking for a way to measure the height of the lid on the bucket, vis a vis arduino code... Dont make stupid suggestions like 'let the laser look for when it doesnt see lid anymore as it scans up.' I need something VERY ROBUST and INTUITIVE. And even adaptive if possible. The heighths that the buckets sit on the conveyer are each a bit different, so your code will probably need to reorient its 'evaluation area/reference frame' within a certain range back/forth // up/down. Let me know if that doesnt make sense. In the picture, (will upload later), you should see 2 mm of space for a properly sealed bucket. Any more than 3 or 4 mm indicates an unsealed lid, usually.
There may also be the complication what you see circled in red. (The robot will do one scan, and do another, a few inches over, but each are still considered important.)
BEFORE YOU WRITE ANY CODE AT ALL:
Part 1: I want a hand drawn and quick written description of how you will analyze a graphic representation of the the bucket side. Straight up draw on a printed picture of my bucket lid lip region or something like that. I want to KNOW what your thinking process is before you even touch a keyboard. I am utterly serious. And I will pay you 30 for that.
Part II: The next piece is I want is a more detailed description of how you would do it. written or typed with a few arrows and boxes as notes on top of my powerpoint slides.
If it is good I will pay 60 for that, but it must be very clear. If it is bad, then you only get 30.
Part III: If i approve part 2 ppt notes, THEN write the code. I will pay what I can for this. No less than $60 if it is good. more bonus milestone $ if it is amazing, obviously.
I have a presentation to make tuesday at the latest next week. I need to have everything in this project completed by then. No extensions possible, AT ALL. NOTE!!! After accepting a bid, I usually set up milestones for completed work in pieces, they always add up to at least bid cost, and after I award all of them, I cancel the large initial bid at the end, since it is the same thing as paying all at once. If that doesnt make sense to you, or if you cant absolutely do the job by monday, or you dont communicate every day, DONT TAKE THE JOB!
I won't award you the project unless you can get the following test correct/working. It doesn't have to be concise, but functional and understandable:
In arduino code, how would you make a 16 row x 100 column matrix, that contains both float and integer numbers, such that each row looks like the following:
{0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00, 400,399,398,397, 0.00,0.000,0.0000,0.00000, 1,2,3,4},
{0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00, 396,395,394,393, 0.00,0.000,0.0000,0.00000, 5,6,7,8},
...and so on
(IMPORTANT: columns 1-4 and 9-12 are float numbers, columns 5-8 and 13-16 are integers).