We have made a all in one solution for smart, vision detecting cameras. Not only do these cameras act smartly with the included microcontroller, they have almost endless applications in various fields
Inspiration
When we came to Calvin hacks this year, we realized that we had no real idea of what to do. Some of us had brought some hardware, including a raspberry pi and an old webcam. We took those two items and challenged ourselves to make something useful with them. That is how we ended up creating Pi in the Sky.
What it does
Pi in the sky is a combination of a micro controller and a camera to create a all in one smart solution for various situations. What we have created has a lot of very cool features that allow almost endless possibilities. From advanced vision detecting trail cams, to security cameras with an extra twist or feature, such as only recording when an actual person is in frame, the options are countless.
How we built it
We used a raspberry pi 4 with a custom water cooling solution and a Sony PS3 eyetoy as a camera to make up the main components of our system. With these two pieces of hardware, we were able to develop a group of programs based on Tensorflow and OpenCV that use the video input from the camera to detect various objects and even other people.
Challenges we ran into
Like any project that was conceived a day before it was due, we ran into a lot of small and large challenges. But our biggest challenge by far was finding a cooling solution for our raspberry pi. Our group member who brought the Pi never thought of bringing any form of heat sink or fan to cool the pi, which it desperately needed after processing and classifying raw video for hours. The main ARM chip on the board was so hot that it was actually reducing performance. We asked around, and no one we talked to had a solution for us. It was 3:00 in the morning and we were desperate. Suddenly, some of our group mates came back with some things that looked like junk at first glance. An old chip bag, and two plastic cups didn't look like much, but when you added ice water to the mix,It was a very reliable cooling system, and our performance soon came back. It was a tough situation that definitely paid off in the end.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Something that all of us as a group are proud of is definitely the solution we came up with to our aforementioned cooling problem. But we are even more proud of the fact that us three came top CalvinHacks without a clue in our minds on what we would do, and we figured it out while here. That definitely was one of our best accomplishments.
What we learned
We definitely gained a lot of experience in areas of CS that we probably would not have explored otherwise. None of us thought we would work with training an algorithm to detract different objects. But we came here and learned it. That was probably my team's best learning experience at this hackathon.
What's next for Pi in the sky
We definitely want to take this idea further. At the moment, we are acting as an open platform, but we want to try to specialize our product to some specific industries or applications in the future. This is a hackathon project that we will keep working on into the future.
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