PiPotter

A raspberry pi camera wand reader, loosely based, yet inspired, on Rpotter

Architecture

The short version: Using a PiNoir camera, once an IR-reflective wand is detected, a 3 seconds movement pattern is recorded. That pattern, a sigil from now on, is passed trough a pre-trained small neural network (SpellNet) and the identified spell is sent to a controller that runs an effect, that may be lights (using the PythonMilight interface) or sound (mplayer) The detection does looks like this, roughly:

Installation

Firstly, clone the env:

git clone https://github.com/Esiravegna/pipotter.git

Required hardware

Raspberry Pi 3. It may work in a 2 or Zero, however, I did not test it. Also,a pinoir camera with led illuminators (the latter may be any other source) are needed. In theory, any IR enabled, picamera compatible camera would do, however, I did not test it. A sound output for the aforementioned RBpi, and a set of lights based on MiLight or LimitlessLED.

Remmeber to have conda installed on the training machine, or berryconda on the raspberry pi

On the training machine

conda env create -f pipotter_training.yaml

On the raspberry pi:

conda env create -f pipotter.yaml

The TensorFlow part will be tricky, as the working images are available for python 3.4, while berryconda provides 3.6. Once you download the wheel, proceed to:

wheel install /the/path/to/the/tensorflow.whl

and then:

pip install protobuf absl-py tensorflow-tensorboard

Et voila!

Usage

Once your prefered effects are set, you can run the server such as:

 ./run.sh --video-source=picamera

This would run the server with the provided config.json. Try

./run.sh --help

for a list of commands.

Where to go from here

Please refer to each directory for the specific help on configuring your own SpellNet, or the effects, or the like.