Planet Arduino

It seems like most narrative games have some kind of drudgery built in. You know, some tedious and repetitious task that you absolutely must do if you want to succeed. In Stardew Valley, that thing is gift giving, which earns you friendship points just like in real life. More important than the giving itself is that each villager has preferences — things they love, like, and hate to receive as gifts. It’s a lot to remember, and most people don’t bother trying and just look it up in the wiki. Well, except for Abigail, who seems to like certain gemstones so much that she must be eating them. She’s hard to forget.

[kutluhan_aktar]’s villager gift preferences bot is a fun and fantastic use of OpenCV. This bot uses a LattePanda Alpha 864s, which is a single-board computer with an Arduino Leonardo built in. It works using template matching, which is basically a game of Where’s Waldo? for computers.

Given a screenshot of each villager in various positions, the LattePanda recognizes them among a given game scene, then does a lookup of their birthday and preferences which the Leonardo prints on a 3.5″ LCD screen. At the same time, it alerts the player with a buzz and big green LED. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.

In Animal Crossing, the drudgery amounts to pressing the A button while catching shooting stars. That’s not a huge problem for a Teensy.

Ever wish you could augment your sense of sight?

[Nick Bild]’s latest hack helps you find objects (or people) by locating their position and tracking them with a laser. The device, dubbed Artemis, latches onto your eyeglasses and can be configured to locate a specific object.

Images collected from the device are streamed to an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier board, which uses a SSD300 (Single Shot MultiBox Detection) model to locate objects. The model was pre-trained with the COCO dataset to recognize and localize 80 different object types given input from images thresholded in OpenCV. Once the desired object is identified and located, a laser diode activates.

Probably due to the current thresholds, the demo runs mostly work on objects placed further apart against a neutral background. It’s an interesting look at applications combining computer vision with physical devices to augment experiences, rather than simply processing and analyzing data.

The device uses two servos for controlling the laser: one for X-axis control and the other for Y-axis control. The controls are executed from an Adafruit Itsy Bitsy M4 Express microcontroller.

Perhaps with a bit more training, we might not have so much trouble with “Where’s Waldo” puzzles anymore.

Check out some of our other sunglasses hacks, from home automation to using LCDs to lessening the glare from headlights.

Sorting out a mountain of screws and other workbench detritus by hand is a task that only appeals to a select few of us. [AdrienR] is not one of those people. He believes the job is better suited to a robot, so he built an intelligent and good-looking machine that does just that.

[Adrien]’s sorting bot is capable of organizing a hodgepodge of parts quickly and effectively. He simply scatters the parts on the light box work surface, illuminates it, and takes a picture with a downward-facing web cam. An algorithm studies the parts and their positions using OpenCV image processing, and sends the triangulation back to the arm so it can pick and place the parts into laser cut boxes using a home brew electromagnet.

[Adrien] calls this a work in progress. He plans to control it with a Raspberry Pi so it can be a standalone unit, and will probably move the parts boxes to the outside curve. Drop yourself past the break to see it sort.

If delta robots are more your sort, this one has balls. Colored balls.

Sudoku is a great way to pass some time, especially on a long flight. However, we don’t think the airlines will let [Sanahm] board with his sudoku-solving robot. The basic machine looks like a 2D plotter made with aluminum extrusion, with the addition of a Raspberry Pi and a camera. The machine can read a sudoku puzzle, solve it, and then fill in the puzzle with a pen. Unlike humans, it should never need to erase its work.

The software uses OpenCV to process the camera data, find the grid, and the cells provided by the puzzle. TensorFlow recognizes the numbers. From there, it is all just math to solve the puzzle. Once solved, the plotter part of the robot takes over and fills in the blanks. After all that, this seems like the easy part.

There’s no video, but the original post has an image of the machine doing its thing. The repository has all the information about the electronics, mechanical construction, and the firmware.

We remember a similar project done with Lego Mindstorms. If you need help getting OpenCV on the Raspberry Pi, we’ve talked about that before, too.

Candy Locker is a mouth-watering tutorial based on  Intel® Edison and image recognition of objects.
You can keep your candies safe from greedy hands with this color recognition lock and a dispenser using a set of 5 distinct color images and setting up a pattern that will activate and dispense candies.

Follow the link and open the magic door of the video and picture recognition,  invent cool systems learning how to manage object recognition and OpenCv foundations.

To some of us, hacking an RC Car to simply follow a black line or avoid obstacles is too easy, and we’re sure [Shazin] would agree with that, since he created an RC Car that follows your face!

The first step to this project was to take control of the RC Car, but instead of hijacking the transmitter, [Shazin] decided to control the car directly. This isn’t any high-end RC Car though, so forget about PWM control. Instead, a single IC (RX-2) was found to handle both the RF Receiver and H-Bridges. After a bit of probing, the 4 control lines (forward/back and left/right) were identified and connected to an Arduino.

[Shazin] paired the Arduino with a USB Host Shield and connected it up with his Android phone through the ADB (Android Debug Bridge). He then made some modifications to the OpenCV Android Face Detection app to send commands to the Arduino based on ‘where’ the Face is detected; if the face is in the right half of the screen, turn right, if not, turn left and go forward.

This is a really interesting project with a lot of potential; we’re just hoping [Shazin] doesn’t have any evil plans for this device like strapping it to a Tank Drone that locks on to targets!

A team of mechanical and electrical engineering students at Olin College came up with a very fun semester project — a pneumatic powered marshmallow cannon that can track faces, and aim for the mouth!

The device — dubbed the Confectionery Canon — is an impressive mechanical build which required many of Olin College’s manufacturing resources such as the laser cutter, the mill, and the lathe. The majority of the device was made out of acrylic, which was chosen for easy laser cutting, and affordability. Specific aluminum pieces provide strength and were made using mostly scrap found in the shop.

Four servos, a webcam, a solenoid and an Arduino Uno make up the electrical system, which uses Python and OpenCV to track faces (GitHub). A PVC tank is used as the pneumatic reservoir, charged with a safety release valve at 30PSI. To fire the cannon, a sprinkler valve is controlled by a beefy solenoid. It currently only has a magazine capacity of 4 large marshmallows, but the team is planning on upgrading soon.

They have put together a great website with tons of information on the project, and following the break is a fun promo video they made for the project — they even got the VP of  the college to try it!

In case you haven’t been counting, we’ve shared over a dozen projects that have come out of Olin College — and they are all awesome. A CNC cake decorator, a Wii-mote controlled go kart, a machine that hand writes for you…