The Most Immersive Pinball Machine: Project Supernova

April 8, 2016 by Moritz Walter 30 Comments

Over at [Truthlabs], a 30 year old pinball machine was diagnosed with a major flaw in its game design: It could only entertain one person at a time. [Dan] and his colleagues set out to change this, transforming the ol’ pinball legend “Firepower” into a spectacular, immersive gaming experience worthy of the 21st century.

A major limitation they wanted to overcome was screen size. A projector mounted to the ceiling should turn the entire wall behind the machine into a massive 15-foot playfield for anyone in the room to enjoy.

With so much space to fill, the team assembled a visual concept tailored to blend seamlessly with the original storyline of the arcade classic, studying the machine’s artwork and digging deep into the sci-fi archives. They then translated their ideas into 3D graphics utilizing Cinema4D and WebGL along with the usual designer’s toolbox. Lasers and explosions were added, ready to be triggered by game interactions on the machine.

To hook the augmentation into the pinball machine’s own game progress, they elaborated an elegant solution, incorporating OpenCV and OCR, to read all five of the machine’s 7 segment displays from a single webcam. An Arduino inside the machine taps into the numerous mechanical switches and indicator lamps, keeping a Node.js server updated about pressed buttons, hits, the “Lange Change” and plunged balls.

The result is the impressive demonstration of both passion and skill you can see in the video below. We really like the custom shader effects. How could we ever play pinball without them?

Continue reading “The Most Immersive Pinball Machine: Project Supernova” →

Mobile Text Reader With OCR And Text To Speech

March 21, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

There are devices out there that will magnify text using fancy cameras and displays, devices that will convert these to Braille, and text-to-speech software has been around for thirty years. For his entry into our Raspberry Pi Zero contest, [Markus] decided to combine all these ideas into a simple device that will turn the printed word into speech.

The impetus for [Markus]’ project came to him in the form of a group of blind computer science students. These students used a specialized program that used specialized hardware and software such as mobile Braille terminals, OCR, and oral exams that allowed these students to study the same thing as everyone else. [Markus] wanted to produce something similar, using simple text-to-speech software instead of a complicated Braille display.

The physical design of [Markus]’ project is uniquely functional – a hand-held device with a camera up front, a Pi in the middle, and a speaker and headphone jack on the back. The hand grip includes a large battery and a trigger for telling the Pi to read a few words aloud.

The software is built around the SnapPicam and includes a lot of the functionality already needed. OCR is largely a solved problem with Tesseract, and text-to-speech is easy with Festival.

Although [Markus] is just plugging a few existing software modules together, he’s come up with a device that is certainly unique and could be exceptionally useful to anyone with a vision impairment.

The Raspberry Pi Zero contest is presented by Hackaday and Adafruit. Prizes include Raspberry Pi Zeros from Adafruit and gift cards to The Hackaday Store!
See All the Entries

Bookworm Playing Bot Tests Programmer’s OCR Skills

March 24, 2014 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

bookworm-bot

Check out this brainy bot with [Jari] whipped up to dominate the Bookworm Deluxe scoreboard. The bot runs on top of a win32 machine, pulling screenshots to see the game board and simulating mouse clicks to play. The video after the jump shows that it plays like a champ, but it took some doing to get this far and [Jari] took the time to share all of the development details.

The hardest part of writing these types of bots is recognizing the game pieces. Check out all of the animation that’s going on in the still shot above… a lot of the tiles are obscured, there are different colors, and the tiles themselves shift as the bot spells and submits each word.

After some trial and error [Jari] settled on an image pre-processor which multiplies pixel values by themselves four times, then looks at each pixel with a 1/6 threshold to produce a black and white face for each tile. From there a bit of Optical Character Recognition compares each tile to a set of known examples. This works remarkably well, leading into the logic and dictionary part of the programming challenge.

Do you think this was easier or harder than the Bejeweled Blitz bot. That one was looking for specific pixel regions, this one is basically a focused roll-your-own OCR script.

Continue reading “Bookworm Playing Bot Tests Programmer’s OCR Skills” →

OCR Automatically Reads A Power Meter

January 3, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

ocr-used-to-read-a-power-meter

[Chris] tried his hand at using Optical Character Recognition in his server power monitoring rig. The image above is what the IP camera used in the setup sees. He’s included a bright light to ensure that the contrast is as great as possible. After applying a threshold filter to the captured still, he is able to process the image to test all seven segments of every digit.

He uses Mathematica for the processing. We’re not familiar with the particulars of the language, but it’s easy enough to see the main parts of the program. Line six of his source code applies the image filters and then the program loops through the assigned location of each digit, testing segment combinations to ascertain what number is shown. Things get hairy when it comes to the decimal point. We gather that the meter can show varying degrees of precision based on the total number of digits needed (like a Digital Multimeter). But [Chris’] setup has a difficult time reliably detecting that decimal point because of its size. He uses a shortcut to get around this, knowing that his server never pulls less than 300W so he corrects the output (by multiplying it by ten) if the reading is below that benchmark.

Of course it would be easier to crack open the monitor and glean data electronically (that’s how the Tweet-A-Watt does it) but then [Chris] wouldn’t have had the fun of playing with OCR.

Google Your Home With A Roomba

March 5, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKRH6uQwOgg]

Meet GåågleBot. GåågleBot is a modified roomba that will not only vacuum your home, but collect data while it does it. While it is carrying out its normal duties as a floor cleaner, it will take pictures, collecting and analyzing all the data for later searches. With built in OCR, you can actually search for things using text strings.

Aside from just carrying out its normal job, you can also remote control it via the web. You can even control theirs!

[via Boing Boing]

DS Based Reader For The Blind

November 30, 2009 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Epokh] has release some homebrew software that uses a Nintendo DS as a voice reader for documents. This is extremely useful for blind and visually impaired folks who normally use screen readers but can utilize this technology for reading books, documents, and email on the go. Future versions look to add an email client and implement OCR via the camera for reading documents on the go.

The flite package is utilized to provide the text to speech functionality. We’re familiar with this package and judging by the video after the break, it lost nothing in the port to the DS hardware. [Epokh] pointed out that similar readers can cost $1500 when a DS sells for around $130. We can’t wait to see the final version fleshed out!

Continue reading “DS Based Reader For The Blind” →

Are You Human? Then Type Out This Book

September 18, 2009 by Mike Szczys 52 Comments

type_this_text

Google has acquired reCAPTCHA and plans to use the system for digitizing books. Wait… what? CAPTCHA is the method of requiring a user to type in a visually obscured word to prove they are human. How can this digitize books? The answer is a bit obscure and takes some time to discover, but you’ll have fun along the way. Continue reading “Are You Human? Then Type Out This Book” →