Development sidequests
· development, arduino, esp32, hardware, embedded
Sidequests rant
Do you ever just get 10 ideas you want to explore, but spending 3 months finding out if it's a good idea makes that idea disappear?
Well. Good news! Now that we have AI, it's just a matter of pushing some buttons and you have a POC.
It's crazy to think that something I would spend 3 months doing is now 3 days of angry typing to an AI, but seriously.
Project lookout
We have this cat and she usually just hangs out around the area and just comes home for food and at night.
But sometimes she wants in and we can't hear her.
I didn't want to spend about 5k NOK on a doorbell thing at the moment, so of course I decided to make something.
So the $10 esp32-cam it is.
Just add a USB serial reader and program in some firmware, get it online so we can do some updates over the air, and boom we have a prototype.
Now we just set it to take a picture, do some math on the device to see if something changed, and if it did, send max 1 per x seconds.
And for a prototype I just soldered on a USB-C power board giving 5V and taped it to the window.
I added some backend and YOLOX for decoding, then some notifications based on what it can see, like a "cat", then it just notifies me if it sees a cat on Mattermost.
Crazy thing is that it's a working prototype running on 3 Docker containers in a Docker Compose and it detected the cat on the first try.
It thinks it's a cow, but what can I say? I completely understand the mistake :D
Moving on
Am I going to do something more with this?
I don't know. I have ordered some more cameras, some with motion detectors and some with better cameras with different SOCs. I am thinking of having one in the garage just to check if the door is open, because why not, using just a magnetic or tilt detector is just not fun.
Maybe a mail detector in the postbox? Who knows, we will see.
Hit me up if I should do something or if you want in on something here.