Last time I delivered on this column, I told you about the USPS’ attempts to fully automate a post office. Of course, that’s a bit of a misnomer, since it took 1,500 employees to actually operate the place on a daily basis. Although Project Turnkey in Rhode Island and Project Gateway in California were proving grounds for all kinds of mail sorting and processing equipment, the act of actually reading addresses and routing mail to its final destination still required human intervention and hand coding.
Today, the post office processes hundreds of millions of mail pieces each day using various pieces of equipment. One of those important pieces of equipment is the OCR address reader, which manages to make sense of all kinds of chicken scratch.
Continue reading “You’ve Got Mail: Reading Addresses With OCR”
In this article, let’s figure out places where you can use a logic analyzer, and places where you can’t. We’ll start with the first limitation of logic analyzers – capture speed. For instance, here’s a cool thing you can buy on Aliexpress – a wristband from TTGO that looks like a usual fitness tracker, but has an ESP32 in it, together with an IMU, an RTC, and an IPS screen! The seller also has an FFC-connectable devboard for programming this wristband over UART, plus vibromotor and heartrate sensor expansion modules.
