Well howdy howdy howdy howdy howdy. This is the beginning of the blog/updates section to my capstone experience
in my final semester as a Computer Science student at St. Norbert College. As you can tell from the first
page, my Capstone project is a way to monitor and report usage of the Computer Science lab by its students.
I'd like to keep this section pretty informal if possible as it just seems to make this a bit more of a lighter
kind of thing then. Most of what I will be posting in here are weekly updates to my project and maybe some links
to websites for research that I find. Hope you enjoy!

   Hey there again. This is the second entry on my Capstone Experience. This second entry is only covering
a couple days, so I don't have that much more to report on from this past Thursday but there is some progress!
Mainly what I've been working towards these past few days have been getting connected to the Foscam and getting 
a picture on the screen from it. Unfortunately, I don't yet have that all the way working but I am getting closer.
The rest of the time has been spent working on solidifying an outline for my project along with researching
some different ways of presenting the reporting data that will be eventually compiled from the Foscam. I was thinking
initially, to populate a spreadsheet in Excel. But I have also tried to look at different things like basing the data
on a calendar presentation where you would click the date on the calendar and it would compile and report the data from there.
Note: I don't currently have any visuals to upload because I'm still working on them, but I will be sure to upload them
when I have them solidified.

   Hiya! Late night updates coming at you. It is currently 11:29:32 PM on February 4th and I finally had a minor brakethrough.
After some time spent this weekend learning that I am completely illiterate when it comes to setting up an internet router.
Good news though, as you can see above, those are screen-shots from the Foscam itself showing its own version of "Hello World".
I now have access to the camera and some basic abilities that the Foscam software has on its own. Next steps now will 
be focusing on getting my own code to recognize the camera and make commands, or figure out the way to make commands
access the Foscam software that way. From there it will be setting up how to store information when motion is detected
and then recording and reporting that data. Sounds so easy when I type it down, but it will be a long road. So goodnight,
sleep tight, and thank goodness the Pats didn't win!

  Hello there, just wanted to give a bit of an update as to what I have been up to during this week and some items
I may have left out of the last post. In my research of the Foscam and the possibility of tracking humans, I have 
come up with a few thoughts. Such as: Implementing the Microsoft Kinect as a monitoring camera instead since it has
skeletal tracking in the camera's firmware. Using a neutral image for a bitmap and compare the differences between the 
pixels. Look into an open source called Tensor Flow where developers have been able to create Kinect-like skeletal tracking
for webcams. Other than this, I have spent a considerable amount of time looking at last year's capstone participants that 
have projects similar to mine. The two projects I have been looking into have been Ben Talbot's and Carl Peterson who
both used the Foscam in their projects last year. Along with that, I have been in personal contact with Ben over the past 
couple weeks in order to get some more tips and help on getting the Foscam online. Other than that, I've been further developing
my outline and developing a PERT chart to show my thoughts and goals for making this project. 

  Hi there, this post is going to be a bit shorter compared to the first few. This weekend had some traveling that
took up a significant amount of time which inhibited too much work and progress to be made. But during the drives
I was able to write up some more design concepts and planning as far as UI for the reporting application. I also was able to
play around a bit with the Kinect SDK and see that it is possible and supported to use C++ and C# for programming languages.
 I plan to hit the code hard this week and get you all some more pictures and some talk through with my professors as to which
camera to utilize for the project from here on. The benefits of the Foscam so far is that there are student resources and 
both of my professors have had some experience and can help me with it. Also, The Foscam has the capability of Wifi streaming,
which means the feed can be viewed without having a computer connected to it at all times. However, the Kinect has skeletal
tracking built within the firmware of the camera, so it will be able to track humans from other motion from the start. Currently,
I am unsure if it has the ability to stream a live video feed over wifi. Otherwise, what I've found is that I can connect a 
computer (camera 1) to the camera to view the feed and then use a remote desktop (on computer 2) connection to view the 
computer(computer 1) connected to the camera. These options will have to be weighed quickly in order to decide on where to go
from here and actually get into the bulk of the project. Thanks for reading! 

  Moving into another week with the capstone project and it is time that I update you all on some events that have
occurred this past week. During the class-times that we held during the week, we participated in mini-poster board sessions.
Every person in the class had the opportunity to present their thoughts and design processes for their projects. 
I found this to be very productive being on both ends of the process. I was glad to receive some important input from both
professors and also some of my fellow students. This also allowed me to get a glimpse into most of my other classmate's projects
and how they were faring. It seems that most of us are in the coding stages or at least getting around to the coding now after
some solid design time. At the end of this post I will post pictures of my board presentation and what I had up there for 
a more visual project-flow and UI design.

	Some important take-aways I had from the poster-sessions were:
		- I need to determine how and what specific data I need to save in order to properly report the lab usage.
			-I.E. Flatfile, network/database, Server requests
		- Check into the possibility of multiple users trying to take over camera control at the same time.
		- Utilizing server requests to get the information from the computer or camera
		- The possibility of running the program to capture the data on the compsci02 server so we wouldn't need
			a physical computer in the lab running at all times.
		- Another possiblity of concern, is compiling and storing data for long periods of time.
			- I.E. how long to store data, Week, Month, Semester, Year
	
	Finally, some updates to the actual process of my capstone project beyond the classroom. This week has been 
another week of working with getting the FosCam and Kinect's functionalities down in order to finally determine 
which to go forward with for the rest of the semester. I have been able to get connected with the FosCam and have some
minor movements and such with it. And the Kinect software allows for easy connection with the camera itself, but
I am looking a little more into the actual programming with it from the interwebs and also some past capstone
experiences with the Kinect itself. The FosCam seems to be more in favor currently because there is more recent
documentation and usability described in Carl's and Ben's capstones as well as the expertise of Dr. Pankratz. 
By the end of this week I aim to have a decision on a camera for my project so that I can solely focus on the 
process of recognizing a human from the camera image. Thank you for reading and I will add more to this 
experience as it arrives.

  Hello again. Over the past couple weeks, in our Capstone Experience we have been talking about the
importance of Human Computer interaction as well as some different ethics of software design and how the 
field is expanding currently. Some of this has been pretty interesting and has given me a chance to 
really think about and continue to plan out my User Interface a bit more in depth. Other that that, this past
couple weeks have been researching how to generate reports in C# as well as looking into a lead that Dr. 
Pankratz found regarding facial recognition. This way I can count the number of people coming into the 
lab from the camera feed. There has been some progress but I do need to refine things a bit and ensure
that I am understanding how the code and algorithms described work in their entirety. I hope to have more
successes this week and be able to have the facial recognition done by the end of next week by the very
latest. 

  Hi everyone, I am going to be going on spring break and looking around for apartments for 
after graduation but there has been some progress made. Unfortunately because I don't know if I will have 
access to theinternet during the whole break I will be switching gears to work on the reporting application 
part of the project. Otherwise, my time has been spent the past week and a half working on troubleshooting some
errors that a friend helped point out with gaining access and controlling the camera. Currently if I
run the program without having the camera and the computer running the application connected to the same
network, then the application fails. Also, I have noticed that the buttons sending the panning commands
to the camera tend to stay pressed even when the user only single clicks the button.  

  Hey there! This is the first week back from spring break and I have made some interesting progress
with the reporting portion of the application. I have found out that there are packages in Visual Studios 2017
that allows a programmer to create and manually open other Microsoft applications. So along with creating the 
option for the user to receive bar graphs and other graphs within the application, it will also be able to
generate and save an Excel document in the active user directory. I also found out how to direct the excel file
that is generated to a specific folder including one that the application creates on the user hard drive just
for these reports. This part proved to be a bit difficult because I had to figure out a way to get the directory
of the current user. For example C:\Users\'Username'\ will be different for every user, so I had to find a way
to know the directory of the user every time in order to create the Reports folder in that user's directory 
everytime. I also have coded it so that if the folder doesn't exist in the User's directory, it automatically
creates one to put the reports in.

  Hello blog readers. This past week during capstones we had our mini demos in class. We presented to 
the rest of the capstone class how our projects were going. Without completely showing our applications or 
our code, we told the class what we have completed, what our next steps where, and some current challenges
that we are facing. I found this to be quite informative for both myself and seeing where all of my other
classmates were. My presentation helped me specifically because I found out that my plans and research 
had begun to stack up so much that I was going outside of the requirements of the project. I was getting too
ambitious with certain aspects and I needed to reestablish my focus on completing the main requirements first
and foremost.

	As far as next steps for myself, this weekend is Easter weekend so there will be some time spent with my
family, but other time will be spent trying to get the recording of the live-stream to work from a user standpoint
then attempt to add in the motion detection to that as well if there is time. Thank you for reading and see you
next week.