For a project I’m involved in (yeah, yeah, it’ll all be posted in due time), I needed a couple of webcams to take simple snapshots. Started out with a cheap unit from eBay, but that one really wasn’t up to its task. Then I found this limited-stock offer at Conrad:
It’s €10 and it even includes a headset which I don’t need. Go figure…
Can’t be much, eh? Well, how about 1280×1024 with auto-focus and auto-white balance?
(you can click-through to see the full-size image)
Amazing stuff. Amazing bargains. Amazing internet. Amazing mail-order. Wow…
The picture is indeed crystal clear: you need more book shelves :-)
Is that a clue to the future project you have left in the bottom left hand corner? What could a “fanbot” be……….
Just guessing, display one of the meters and create a numeric value from a picture.
I bought a pair a webcams for 10 euros, they also came with an audio I didn’t use, but had builtin lighting, which was useful for installing in a dark place, like where the electricity meter is. It’s still an ongoing project though, because the digit recognition turned out to be not as simple as I’d hoped… I thought ‘neural network’ but it overfit terribly.
Anyway, I’m curious what you have in mind for your webcams.
First will be a project totally unrelated to the JeeLabs stuff, but once the webcams come back I’d like to try a few things with them. Digit recognition would be an ambitious but definitely very interesting goal.
Try tweaking http://jocr.sourceforge.net/ … Should be WAY easier than writing your own OCR…