This week was an awesome and exciting week for Fly Bye. On Monday afternoon, the Fly Bye team drove down to Miami to present our work to our USDA liaison Dr. Barukh Rohde and the rest of the USDA team. Although we had met Dr. Rohde last week at Metro Diner, this was the first time visiting the USDA ARS station in Miami. 

During our Miami site visit, we were able to present our initial prototype to a group of USDA research scientists. We were able to show that our programmed microcontroller could take pictures of a fly on the sticker paper inside the prototype housing. Then, those photos could be processed by a ML model which can identify the species of fly on the sticky paper. We received great feedback for our prototype and presentation that we can implement in the future. Additionally, Dr. Rohde helped us clear some misconceptions on the infrared-based prototype, which will help us design a better prototype in the future.  

While we were in Miami, Dr. Rohde took us out to two delicious restaurants. It was great talking to him about his career and life, and we really enjoyed the delicious food. On Monday, it was Halloween, so  Dr. Rohde is wearing a costume. 

On the USDA site, he gave Fly Bye a tour of the facility. We drove around on a golf cart looking at all the different plants and agricultural products grown on the site. It was fun, and we had the opportunity to try some fresh fruits. We plan on making a vlog showcasing our experiences and will post that soon. 

Overall, this week was a great team and liaison bonding experience and a unique opportunity for our team to narrow our focus on the different aspects of our project.

Many exciting things are happening this week for team Fly Bye. On Tuesday morning, we met with our liaison engineer Dr. Barukh Rohde for breakfast at Metro Diner. This was our first time meeting Dr. Rohde in person so we were all excited for the opportunity and enjoyed spending the morning with him! The team is also working hard to complete all components for the prototype we will be presenting as we travel to the USDA ARS station in Miami next week. Our CAD model, microprocessor/camera/code, and machine learning algorithm are all coming together to form one cohesive system that we plan on demonstrating for our upcoming trip.  

In addition to lots of progress on our image-based prototype, components for the infrared-based prototype are finally available for our use. There was a delay in the ordering of our Fresnel lenses due to necessity of paperwork between the university and the supplier, but now we have most of the components and can begin the breadboarding process. 

Fly Bye is excited to spend time in Miami for Halloween and most of all is excited to visit our sponsor’s laboratory at the USDA ARS station and meet Dr. Rohde’s colleagues! 

Team Fly Bye presented the Preliminary Design Review to the liaison, Dr. Barukh Rohde, on Tuesday. In addition, we submitted our PDR report. Even with these big assignments, we have made significant progress: Sebastian and Griffin took photos of sticky traps to use for the machine learning models, Whitney tuned the CAD designs, Adam soldered the Arducam board and started programming it, and Alyssa organized the infrared prototype parts to prepare for construction. With the PDR assignments out of the way, we will make even more progress next week–particularly with training the machine learning models for the image-based prototype. We still expect to have a working prototype when we present to USDA ARS researchers on November 1.

This week Team Fly Bye presented their Preliminary Design Review presentation. The team is working hard to get caught up after the delays caused by Hurricane Ian. Our PDR report and presentation is being submitted today. Our first prototype has been sent for printing with the second following close behind! It is a busy time as we push through midterms but our team is handling the busy schedule beautifully.

Last week was cut short due to Hurricane Ian; however, we were able to complete our first draft of the First Month’s Report and continued ordering parts for both prototypes.

While we have been set back by the hurricane, we are still pressing on the detect those flies! We came back early in the week to find that our sticky-fly-trap paper, our camera, and our micro-processor have all arrived! We also came to find that the dead Caribbean and Mediterranean fruit flies our liaison, Dr. Rhode, had promised to send us have also arrived… we promise it’s not a bio-hazard!

Now that we have these materials, we are in good standing to begin programming the camera and micro-processor to begin taking pictures and collecting image data for our image-based detection system.

On the structural portion of the project, we now have our first iteration of a CAD model for the housing of our image-based detection system!

On the detection portion of the project, we now have also been able to successfully detect objects using online tutorials of object detection methods!

Next up, we are preparing for our upcoming meeting with our sponsors in Miami. To prepare, we have invested time in compiling a PowerPoint presentation that we will be using to present to other teams, and later to our sponsor, as well as a product architecture document that outlines the layout of our prototypes.

We are excited to see how our prototypes come to be as this semester keeps on flying by!