Using TensorFlow To Recognize Your Own Objects

May 23, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 9 Comments

When the time comes to add an object recognizer to your hack, all you need do is choose from many of the available ones and retrain it for your particular objects of interest. To help with that, [Edje Electronics] has put together a step-by-step guide to using TensorFlow to retrain Google’s Inception object recognizer. He does it for Windows 10 since there’s already plenty of documentation out there for Linux OSes.

You’re not limited to just Inception though. Inception is one of a few which are very accurate but it can take a few seconds to process each image and so is more suited to a fast laptop or desktop machine. MobileNet is an example of one which is less accurate but recognizes faster and so is better for a Raspberry Pi or mobile phone.

You’ll need a few hundred images of your objects. These can either be scraped from an online source like Google’s images or you get take your own photos. If you use the latter approach, make sure to shoot from various angles, rotations, and with different lighting conditions. Fill your background with various other things and even have some things partially obscuring your objects. This may sound like a long, tedious task, but it can be done efficiently. [Edje Electronics] is working on recognizing playing cards so he first sprinkled them around his living room, added some clutter, and walked around, taking pictures using his phone. Once uploaded, some easy-to-use software helped him to label them all in around an hour. Note that he trained on 24 different objects, which are the number of different cards you get in a pinochle deck.

You’ll need to install a lot of software and do some configuration, but he walks you through that too. Ideally, you’d use a computer with a GPU but that’s optional, the difference being between three or twenty-four hours of training. Be sure to both watch his video below and follow the steps on his Github page. The Github page is kept most up-to-date but his video does a more thorough job of walking you through using the software, such as how to use the image labeling program.

Why is he training an object recognizer on playing cards? This is just one more step in making a blackjack playing robot. Previously he’d done an impressive job using OpenCV, even though the algorithm handled non-overlapping cards only. Google’s Inception, however, recognizes partially obscured cards. This is a very interesting project, one which we’ll be keeping an eye on. If you have any ideas for him, leave them in the comments below.

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Richard Feynman: A Life Of Curiosity And Science

May 15, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 53 Comments

It was World War II and scientists belonging to the Manhattan Project worked on calculations for the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, in one of the buildings, future Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was cracking the combination lock on a safe because doing so intrigued him. That’s as good a broad summary of Feynman as any: scientific integrity with curiosity driving both his work and his fun.

If you’ve heard of him in passing it may be because of his involvement on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster commission or maybe you’ve learned something from one of his many lectures preserved on YouTube. But did you know he also played with electronics as a kid, and almost became an electrical engineer?

He was the type of person whom you might sum up by saying that he had an interesting life. The problem is, you have to wonder how he fit it all into one lifetime, let alone one article. We’ll just have to let our own curiosity pick and choose what to say about this curious character.

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Held Captive By Arduino And Multiple RFID Readers

May 13, 2018 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

If you’re the kind of person who has friends, and/or leaves the confines of the basement from time to time, we hear that these “Escape Rooms” are all the rage. Basically you get locked into a room with a couple other people and have to solve various problems and puzzles until you’ve finally made enough progress that they let you out. Which actually sounds a lot like the working conditions here at Hackaday HQ, except they occasionally slip some pizza rolls under the door for us which is nice.

Whichever side you find yourself on in one of these lighthearted hostage situations, knowledge of this multi-tag RFID lock created by [Annaane] may come in handy. By connecting multiple MFRC522 RFID readers to an Arduino Uno, she’s come up with a method of triggering a device (like an electronic door lock) only when the appropriate combination of RFID tags have been arranged. With a little imagination, this allows for some very complex puzzle scenarios which are sure to keep your prisoners enthralled until you can lower the lotion down to them.

Her code allows you to configure the type and number of RFID cards required to trigger one of the Arduino’s digital pins, which usually would be connected to a relay to fire off whatever device you want. The Arduino sketch is also setup to give “hints” to the player by way of a status LED: fast blinking let’s you know the tag scanned is wrong, and slow blinking means you don’t have enough scanned in yet.

The video after the break shows some highlights of the build, as well as a quick demonstration of how both the RFID “combination” and manual override can be used to trigger the attached relay.

Hackers do love RFID. Using them for physical access control is a fairly common project around these parts, and we’ve even seen similar setups for the digital realm.

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The Anxiety Of Open Source: Why We Struggle With Putting It Out There

May 1, 2018 by Bob Baddeley 60 Comments

You’ve just finished your project. Well, not finished, but it works and you’ve solved all the problems worth solving, and you have a thing that works for you. Then you think about sharing your creation with the world. “This is cool” you think. “Other people might think it’s cool, too.” So you have to take pictures and video, and you wish you had documented some more of the assembly steps, and you have to do a writeup, and comment your code, and create a repository for it, maybe think about licensing. All of a sudden, the actual project was only the beginning, and now you’re stressing out about all the other things involved in telling other people about your project, because you know from past experience that there are a lot of haters out there who are going to tear it down unless it’s perfect, or even if it is, and even if people like it they are going to ask you for help or to make one for them, and now it’s 7 years later and people are STILL asking you for the source code for some quick little thing you did and threw up on YouTube when you were just out of college, and of course it won’t work anymore because that was on Windows XP when people still used Java.

Take a deep breath. We’ve all been there. This is an article about finding a good solution to sharing your work without dealing with the hassle. If you read the previous paragraph and finished with a heart rate twice what you started, you know the problem. You just want to share something with the world, but you don’t want to support that project for the rest of your life; you want to move on to new and better and more interesting projects. Here are some tips.

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Hackaday Belgrade Schedule Announced

April 29, 2018 by Mike Szczys No comments

Hackaday Belgrade preparations have now passed the flash point and the hacker village that is set to descend on Serbia in a few weeks grows larger and more awesome by the day. Prepare for a massive data dump on what is in store. But before you go any further, make sure you have a ticket.

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Ask Hackaday: What’s In Your Digital Bugout Bag?

April 9, 2018 by Dan Maloney 119 Comments

Your eyes pop open in the middle of the night, darting around the darkened bedroom as you wonder why you woke up. Had you heard something? Or was that a dream? The matter is settled with loud pounding on the front door. Heart racing as you see blue and red lights playing through the window, you open the door to see a grim-faced police officer standing there. “There’s been a hazardous materials accident on the highway,” he intones. “We need to completely evacuate this neighborhood. Gather what you need and be ready to leave in 15 minutes.”

Most people will live their entire lives without a scenario like this playing out, but such things happen all the time. Whether the disaster du jour is man-made or natural, the potential to need to leave in a big hurry is very real, and it pays to equip yourself to survive such an ordeal. The primary tool for this is the so-called “bugout bag,” a small backpack for each family member that contains the essentials — clothing, food, medications — to survive for 72 hours away from home.

A bugout bag can turn a forced evacuation from a personal emergency into a minor inconvenience, as those at greatest risk well know — looking at you, Tornado Alley. But in our connected world, perhaps it pays to consider updating the bugout bag to include the essentials of our online lives, those cyber-needs that we’d be hard-pressed to live without for very long. What would a digital bugout bag look like?

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Dublin Knows How To Bring-a-Hack

April 9, 2018 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

When on the road, we love to stop by a local hackerspace and connect with the hacker community. On Friday, TOG Hackerspace in Dublin, Ireland opened their doors to host a Bring-a-Hack with Hackaday and Tindie.

The city center of Dublin is anything but a grid. The cobblestone roads meander every which way and are a puzzle of one-way and surprise construction, none of which seemed to faze Google’s navigation algorithms. I was happy to be operating the smartphone instead of the rental vehicle. A big thanks goes to Jenny List for taking on the stress of driving on our refreshments run without coming in contact with people or cars.

You’re likely wondering why the street layout of the city deserves such attention. I’m used to centrally-located Hackerspaces being tight on space, and indeed the members of TOG cautioned us that 50 people would feel cramped. Much the opposite, the pubs, restaurants, hotels, and performing arts centers are not small, nor winding, nor made of cobblestones. Dublin is a fantastic place to party, with plenty of space for us hardware geeks to congregate. TOG itself, which about 20 minutes walk from the central Temple Bar area (where this image was taken), even has a small parking lot which made our beer drop off and pizza delivery a breeze.

A Tour of TOG Hackerspace

TOG is a Gaelic word which loosely translates as “to make”. Declan met us for the beer drop and gave us a tour when we returned for the evening event. The building is divided into several different spaces, starting with an entry area that serves as a meeting space, gaming room, and showcase of projects.

Where you might see prayer flags strung up on an apartment building, we see floppy disks (both the hard and soft variety) strung around the meeting area. Declan has a shamrock of K’nex parts wired up with a microphone controlled RGB LED strip — it’s like a test your strength game to see who can shout the coolest colors.

3.5″ Floppies

5.25″ Floppies

Sound-activated shamrock

Shamrock is RGB

How would you do on fabric anatomy?

I also really enjoyed the fabric anatomy display that has snaps on each organ and only lights up the labels if you complete the circuits in the correct locations.

These are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much more after the break so join me for the rest of the tour, and some of the notable hacks that showed up on Friday evening.

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