Sunday, September 27, 2015

Stamp sorter part 2

I spoke with friend about whether he'd be willing to purchase the hardware for himself and I would program it. My payment would be keeping ownership of the software. He thinks it's a good idea.

However he suggested that I get the image recognition software working first before purchasing the robot arm. No unnecessary expense if software is not feasible. I think that's a good idea.

So I'll order a BeagleBone Green and camera module and see what we can do.

Interestingly for me this device is just what I want for my Threesus robot.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Another possible gadget to make some money.

A friend makes a few dollars by buying large quantities of stamped envelopes, soaking the stamps off and selling the used stamps to stamp collectors for various prices depending on the quality of the stamps.

However, before selling the used stamps, he culls through the batch, looking for uncancelled stamps which can be used as mint originals. He is able to sell bundles of these uncancelled stamps for half their face value to small businesses wishing to save money on their mailing costs. Small businesses, small batches, small numbers all round.

So we need a (one-off!) device to do the following:

  1. Scan the stamp
  2. Identify which stamp it is by comparison with a catalog of current issues
  3. Compare how close the image is to a mint image
  4. Put the stamp in some sort of "uncancelled" bin, ready for re-use.
Equipment needed:

  1. Raspberry Pi 2 (or BeagleBoneGreen) with camera module
  2. A pick and place arm with vacuum head to
    1. lift a stamp from an unordered pile
    2. rotate the stamp to a normalised position
    3. hold stamp in front of camera
    4. place stamp in "used" or "unused" bin depending on id
Robot arm is available as a kit already although it might be interesting to make my own with my new laser cutter. All the rest is software.

Friday, September 25, 2015

Making a gadget factory.

I've been overwhelmed by illness for the past few months. Nausea, fatigue, confuddled thoughts. Basically a write-off.

My friend Marty has been in a similar situation after coming off his motor bike. He however seems to be healing much faster than I and is madly thinking up gadgets he and I can design and assemble.

I've wanted to put together a gadget factory for a while now. It's hard to justify the cost of some of the tools you need to assemble gadgets these days. They're heaps cheaper than when I was starting out as a gadget maker in the '70s but it's still a lot of money for me now that I'm attempting to live on my pension. So it occurred to me that if we could actually sell some of these gadgets it might make the factory a bit better than a sinkhole into which I pour my dollars.

To add to the impetus to start a business is the weakening Australian dollar. Makes the gadgets even cheaper to US and EU customers. And I also discovered another effect of the weak dollar. Some Australian Ebay sellers have purchased stock from China in USD. It literally halves the price of one expensive tool I was looking at.

So some gadgets we've been toying with.

  1. Marty thinks an automatic "fall over" light for bikes would be useful. Simple, easy to design and build, a ready market among his bikie friends.
  2. Elevator music player + WiFi repeater. Repeaters are dirt cheap but if you could add a web site to the repeater which replays non-repeating, synthesised guitar music, every office can plug one in and switch people to the music site when they are on hold. No music royalties, no maintenance to change DVDs etc
  3. Credit-card-sized tin with accelerometers to act as an effect pedal. Ultra-low powered circuit (3xAAAs for a year). Basic effects by default, programmable over WiFi and/or BLE (use Apple Watch as control unit).
  4. Simplified iPhone and/or AW app to control RGB LED strips.



Perl Threesus works but not well enough.

As expected I've not been able to speed up my Perl5(or 6) version of Threesus AI to compete with the C# version. It's possible I could attempt to optimise every line of code but I really don't want to waste the time.

I think I will wait for a more usable version of RPerl.org.