Electrical work on MARCO is complete!

The LiDAR module is electrically integrated and test scripts are returning valid results.  Furthermore the filter actuator is flicking back and forth happily, the camera is taking pictures, the lights are script-operated, and I haven't seen any open flames on the thing since mid-August, meaning that all of the electrical and mechanical assembly of the MARCO experimental optical array is complete!

Finally my lab (bedroom) can stop smelling like charred plastic and epoxy.

One small note on the LiDAR scripting, the LiDAR Lite v3 using i2c protocol does not currently work with the latest versions of Raspbian (maybe the newer ones do, it's a known issue).  This forced me to roll back to an earlier version, which so far has not been a big deal, but we'll see if it impacts my instalation of OpenCV, which is the python library I will be using to pick apart my images.

Moving forward, the script to operate the LiDAR should take all of 3 minutes to write, then I will have scripts operating all the MARCO hardware, which is pretty neat.  At that point I can take a sample image of the polo target I have printed out and begin working on target acquisition and write a supervised machine learning module for color recognition.  This is the hard part of the project and progress may be slow, but I'll be adding pictures and pages to the blog to hopefully convey my ideas for MARCO better.

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