Four Pi Zeros, Four Cameras, One Really Neat 3D Scanner

January 17, 2018 by Jenny List 24 Comments

Sometimes when you walk into a hackerspace you will see somebody’s project on the table that stands so far above the norm of a run-of-the-mill open night on a damp winter’s evening, that you have to know more. If you are a Hackaday scribe you have to know more, and you ask the person behind it if they have something online about it to share with the readership.

[Jolar] was working on his 3D scanner project on just such an evening in Oxford Hackspace. It’s a neatly self-contained unit in the form of a triangular frame made of aluminium extrusions, into which are placed a stack of Raspberry Pi Zeros with attached cameras, and a very small projector which needed an extra lens from a pair of reading glasses to help it project so closely.

The cameras are arranged to have differing views of the object to be scanned, and the projector casts an array of randomly created dots onto it to aid triangulation from the images. A press of a button, and the four images are taken and, uploaded to a cloud drive in this case, and then picked up by his laptop for processing.

A Multi-view Stereo (MVS) algorithm does the processing work, and creates a 3D model. Doing the processing is VisualSFM, and the resulting files can then be viewed in MeshLab or imported into a CAD package. Seeing it in action the whole process is quick and seamless, and could easily be something you’d see on a commercial product. There is more to come from this project, so it is definitely one to watch.

Four Pi boards may seem a lot, but it is nothing to this scanner with 39 of them.

Raspberry Pi Offers Soulless Work Oversight

January 15, 2018 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

If you’re like us, you spend more time than you care to admit staring at a computer screen. Whether it’s trying to find the right words for a blog post or troubleshooting some code, the end result is the same: an otherwise normally functioning human being is reduced to a slack-jawed zombie. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to quantify just how much of your life is being wasted basking in the flickering glow of your monitor? Surely that wouldn’t be a crushingly depressing piece of information to have at the end of the week.

With the magic of modern technology, you need wonder no longer. Prolific hacker [dekuNukem] has created the aptly named “facepunch”, which allows you to “punch in” with nothing more than your face. Just sit down in front of your Raspberry Pi’s camera, and the numbers start ticking away. It’s like the little clock in the front of a taxi: except at the end you don’t have to pay anyone, you just have to come to terms with what your life has become. So that’s cool.

It doesn’t take much hardware to play along at home. All you need is a Raspberry Pi and the official camera accessory. Though for the full effect you should add one of the displays supported by the Luma.OLED driver so you can see the minutes and hours ticking away in real-time.

To get the facial recognition going, all you need to do is take a well-lit picture of your face and save it as a 400×400 JPEG. The Python 3 script will take care of the rest: checking the frames from the camera every few seconds to see if your beautiful mug is in the frame, and incrementing the counters accordingly.

Even if you’re not in the market for an Orwellian electronic supervisor, this project is a great example to get you started in the world of facial recognition. With a little luck, you’ll be weaponizing it in no time.

Bringing MATLAB To A Vacuum Near You

November 23, 2017 by Al Williams 7 Comments

The essence of hacking is modifying something to do a different function. Many of us learned as kids, though, that turning the family TV into an oscilloscope often got you into trouble.

These days, TVs are flat and don’t have high voltage inside, but there’s always the family robot, often known as a Roomba. Besides providing feline transportation, these little pancake-shaped robots also clean floors.

If you don’t want to evict the cat and still get a robust domestic robot platform for experimentation, about $200 will get you a Roomba made to be hacked — the iRobot Create 2. [Gstatum] has a tutorial for using a Raspberry Pi and MATLAB to get one quickly running and even doing basic object recognition using the Pi’s camera.

The code even interfaces with Twitter. The impressive part is the code fits on about a page. This isn’t, however, completely autonomous. It uses a connected phone’s sensor’s so that the phone’s orientation controls the robot’s motion, but the robot does use sensors to prevent driving into walls or falling off a cliff. It also can detect being picked up and uses the Pi’s camera to detect a green flag.

Continue reading “Bringing MATLAB To A Vacuum Near You” →

RaspiReader, An Open Source Fingerprint Reader

September 4, 2017 by Jenny List 14 Comments

In 2008, the then German interior minister, [Wolfgang Schäuble] had his fingerprint reproduced by members of the German Chaos Computer Club, or CCC, and published on a piece of plastic film distributed with their magazine. [Schäuble] was a keen proponent of mass gathering of biometric information by the state, and his widely circulated fingerprint lifted from a water glass served as an effective demonstration against the supposed infallibility of biometric information.

Diagram showing the fingerprint reader's operation. — Diagram showing the fingerprint reader’s operation.

It was reported at the time that the plastic [Schäuble] fingerprint could fool the commercial scanners of the day, including those used by the German passport agency, and the episode caused significant embarrassment to the politician. The idea of “spoofing” a fingerprint would completely undermine the plans for biometric data collection that were a significant policy feature for several European governments of the day.

It is interesting then to read a paper from Michigan State University, “RaspiReader: An Open Source Fingerprint Reader Facilitating Spoof Detection” (PDF downloadable from the linked page) by [Joshua J. Engelsma], [Kai Cao], and [Anil K. Jain] investigates the mechanism of an optical fingerprint reader and presents a design using the ever-popular Raspberry Pi that attempts to detect and defeat attempts at spoofing. For the uninitiated is serves as a fascinating primer on FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) photography of fingerprints, and describes their technique combining it with a conventional image to detect spoofing. Best of all, the whole thing is open-source, meaning that you too can try building one yourself.

If [Cao] and [Jain] sound familiar, maybe it’s from their Samsung Galaxy fingerprint hack last year, so it’s neat to see them at work on the defense side. If you think that fingerprints make good passwords, you’ve got some background reading to do. If you just can’t get enough fingerprints, read [Al Williams]’ fundamentals of fingerprint scanning piece from earlier this year.

Via Hacker News.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Rangefinder + Camera = SmartZoom

May 23, 2017 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

The interesting thing about submissions for The Hackaday Prize is seeing unusual projects and concepts that might not otherwise pop up. [ken conrad] has a curious but thoughtfully designed idea for Raspberry Pi-based SmartZoom Imaging that uses a Pi Zero and camera plus some laser emitters to create a device with a very specific capability: a camera that constantly and dynamically resizes the image make the subject appear consistently framed and sized, regardless of its distance from the lens. The idea brings together two separate functions: rangefinding and automated zooming and re-sampling of the camera image.

The Raspberry Pi uses the camera board plus some forward-pointing laser dots as a rangefinder; as long as at least two laser dots are visible on the subject, the distance between the device and the subject can be calculated. The Pi then uses the knowledge of how near or far the subject is to present a final image whose zoom level has been adjusted to match (and offset) the range of the subject from the camera, in effect canceling out the way an object appears larger or smaller based on distance.

We’ve seen visible laser dots as the basis of rangefinding before, but never tied into a zoom function. Doubtlessly, [ken conrad] will update his project with some example applications, but in the meantime we’re left wondering: is there a concrete, practical use case for this unusual device? We have no idea, but we’d certainly have fun trying to find one.

Detect Cars Running Stop Signs (and Squirrels Running Across The Roof)

April 12, 2017 by Rich Hawkes 40 Comments

In order to avoid the traffic and delays on a major thoroughfare, cars take the road behind [Devin Gaffney]’s house, but he noticed a lot of cars didn’t bother to stop at the stop sign. He had a Raspberry Pi and a camera, so he set them up to detect the violating cars.

His setup is pretty standard – Raspberry Pi and camera pointed outside at the intersection. He’s running OpenCV and using machine learning to detect the cars and determine if they have run the stop sign or not. His website has some nice charts showing when the violations occurred by hour and by day of the week. Also on the site are links that you can use to help train the system in noticing cars, cars that run the stop sign, determining if there’s enough of the video to determine if there’s a violation, and whether or not there’s a car going the wrong way through the intersection.

This is an interesting use of the Pi and OpenCV; there’s no guarantee that this will help the people of [Devin]’s neighborhood, but hopefully gives them some ammunition (assuming they want something done about the intersection.) It’s a cheap and easy setup and it’s nice to let the community have a hand in training the system.

For more OpenCV, check out this article on taking the perfect jump shot or this one which tries to quantify cloudiness.

Continue reading “Detect Cars Running Stop Signs (and Squirrels Running Across The Roof)” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Detecting Adulterated Food Using AI

April 10, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 17 Comments

Adulterated food is food that has a substance added to it to save on manufacturing costs. It can have a negative effect, it can reduce the food’s potency or it can have no effect at all. In many cases it’s done illegally. It’s also a widespread problem, one which [G. Vignesh] has decided to take on as his entry for the 2017 Hackaday Prize, an AI Based Adulteration Detector.

On his hackaday.io Project Details page he outlines some existing methods for testing food, some which you can do at home: adulterated sugar may have chalk added to it, so put it in water and the sugar will dissolve while the chalk will not. His approach is to instead take high-definition photos of the food and, on a Raspberry Pi, apply filters to them to reveal various properties such as density, size, color, texture and so on. He also mentions doing image analysis using a deep learning neural network. This project touches us all and we’ll be watching it with interest.

If all this talk of adulterated food makes you nervous about your food supply then consider growing our own, hacker style. One such project we’ve seen here on Hackaday is Farmbot, an open-source CNC farming robot. Another such is MIT’s OpenAg Food Computer, a robotic control and monitoring growing chamber.