Master thesis

Completed on 14/09/2016 by Marius Hacker

Many people are familiar with peg beads from pre-school age: small, colourful
plastic beads with a central hole can be pegged onto special peg boards
to create colourful pictures or symmetrical patterns
. A finished work can then be heated with a
iron, for example. This causes the
beads to fuse together so that it can be removed in one piece from the underlying
studded plate and is permanent. It can be used, for example, as a
window picture or coaster.

As the creation of a plug-in bead picture is time-consuming, a system for the automated creation
of such plug-in bead pictures was realised in
of the System Software and Distributed Systems department as part of a
student thesis. This system - based on
a small RaspberryPi computer in conjunction with an Arduino - is to be used
at student information days, for example, to illustrate the
versatility of the tasks and possibilities of
Computing Science.

The system available to date has focussed purely on the
mechanical creation of plug-in bead images; this involved overcoming a number of
technical challenges, including separating and
placing the individual plug-in beads as accurately as possible. As the
beads are produced as inexpensive mass-produced goods,
they are not subject to any quality control. This results in large variations in size
. As a result, the realised system may not
be able to place individual beads correctly. The previous
system can only
deal with such errors to a very limited extent when producing an image.

The aim of the work is to expand the existing system for creating
plug-in beads to include error tolerance concepts and steps for
quality control. Due to the misplacements of the
previous system, it is very unlikely that a large
plug-in bead pattern can be created without errors. By using
error tolerance mechanisms, this probability can be drastically
increased. For example, a list of misplacements can be created during
the placement of beads, which is then processed after the
image has been created. In addition, the
resulting image could be compared with the
original using a camera. Deviations would also have to be corrected
. Many further improvements are possible both technically and
algorithmically, so that the processor has a variety of
starting points. The system was programmed using C++
and libraries from Qt, so that corresponding knowledge is not a
disadvantage.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Oliver Theel