Hardware issues and the beginning of vision processing

It's been a while since my last post, but I've made a fair amount of progress. I was testing the pan-tilt rig when I started to run into some issues with it. The power supply I was using could only supply a maximum of .5 amps and the two servos together were drawing substantially more then that. This was causing the voltage to dip and the servo motors to start acting sporadically. Luckily, a guy I work with was kind enough to give me an old computer power supply, which can provide more than enough current to power the two servos. Unfortunately, using the PSU limits me to running the servos at 12 volts, which isn't ideal because it will wear the servos out, but the servos are cheap and it's what I've got.

During my time troubleshooting the servos, I took the two of them apart to see if anything overt was wrong. Much to my dismay, I discovered that the servo controlling the tilt action is actually missing about 2 teeth on one of the gears. While the servo still works, there is a certain area in its rotation where it sputters and skips. I'm still going to use it, but the laser pointer won't be nearly as precise now.

I should be making another post soonish as I've made some headway with object tracking using python and openCV. More on that to come in the near future.