26 - Kitty Cakes

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from being cat people. We actually have 6 cats we've rescued over the past few years, with others we have passed along to local animal shelters to be saved by other families. Through this, we've learned many shelters, even in populated areas like the DMV, struggle to find enough resources to function day-to-day. With the Pandemic came along the rise of Twitch, a live streaming platform. It truly is a valuable asset for nonprofits that is not currently being utilized. We strive to create a streamlined process to assist these organizations.

What it does

Uses AI and ML to recognize cats in live stream frame.

How we built it

After 5 failed 3D prints, we were able to successfully print a rat that conceals many of the internal electronics. These electronics include a stepper motor that moves the phone camera in 360 degrees. The motor is controlled by a Raspberry Pi running a Python Flask Server. This is called by another server that communicates with Google Cloud to classify the name of the cat on stream.Our own cats were used to train Google's AutoML model. Finally, every second, an image is grabbed from the twitch stream running from the phone and sent to Google Cloud. If the frame has the most donated to cat in it, the motor stops and focuses on the target. If not, the motor will continue to spin to search for the cat.

Challenges we ran into

Getting a high quality stream out from the rasberry pi's camera. Integrating the various services together such as Twilio, Google Cloud, and the numerous custom servers and clients we use.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to remotely turn the camera on the motor using Google Cloud ML model.

What we learned

During the project, we learned the big difference between design and application. While developing the system different changes needed to pe applied to make a functional product. Additionally, we learned how to implement systems that we hadn’t used before like Google Cloud and Twilio, and interlace them to provide us with the different outcomes we wanted.