Project Friday 1.3: Artificial Intelligence meets coffee
Last Friday the third afternoon of Project Friday took place. In Project Friday we spent about once a month an afternoon on something completely useless. Why do we do this? Because we can, it’s fun and interesting and it’s a good reason to grab a couple of beers. This Project Friday is all about mixing Espresso Machines with Artificial Intelligence: adding facial recognition to the machine so that you don’t need to push the button to get your favorite coffee.
In the previous afternoons (day 1 and day 2), we’ve installed everything on the Raspberry PI (which was quite a hassle), learned what relays were and how to use them, soldered the first buttons and were able to control these buttons via the computer. This Friday we set ourselves the goal to real time face detection on the PI cam.
As the weather was warm and sunny, we decided it was better to leave the office and reach our goal in a more suitable environment, somewhere we the Raspberry PI (and us) wouldn’t overheat. So we drove to my place and settled ourselves in the garden, brought a television outside, hooked up the Raspberry PI and off coding we went. An additional benefit was the BBQ!
Astonishingly enough, not only the Raspberry PI had trouble with the warm weather, so did your cognitive capabilities. The move didn’t make us more productive (but was still the right choice with this kind of weather). So progress was slow, and we were on half the strength as three team members were on holiday. We did had some success, we did manage to implement the pre-trained HAAR-cascades for detecting faces and our trained cascade for detecting your middle finger when you flip it. But didn’t get so far to get default face recognition in place. So we’ll leave that for the next afternoon!
Read more about what happened before or read more about what happened next
