Day 294 of 1000
I talked about a new project on which I am about to embark. There will be a part of this project that is not so technical, but more business/touchy-feely/people oriented, but we have to start with this. The touch-feely part will not start for several to many months. Still, we have to do the technical part before we can get to the people oriented part.
The first part of the project that belongs to me is the reading of license plates with an embedded Linux computer. I have a BeagleBoard XM that will work just fine. It has four USB ports to hook up cameras and works great with eLinux.
BeagleBoard XM
I have hooked up a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to the BeagleBoard for development.
BeagleBoard XM development setup
After everything is developed, none of that stuff will be attached. The only things that will be attached are two cameras, one for license plate images and one for snapshots. More about those snapshots in post that will not appear for several months. Right now we are concentrating on getting the system to read license plates. Here are the cameras we will use to do the development. I am not sure we will use them for the final product, but this is how we are going to start.
Imaging Souce cameras to hook to the BeagleBoard XM
The system I develop will report the license plates numbers to a second computer. I will use a EeePC netbook as the computer server that receives the license plate numbers and images from a snapshot after they are read. Both of these computers will run the Xubuntu operating system. In real life, the EeePC will not be the server with whom the BeagleBoard normally talks, but I need something to emulate the process while I develop the license plate reading capabilities. I am going to try to use Xubuntu on the BeagleBoard for this project. I will have more to say about that later.
EeePC to recieve license plate numbers and images
…but I do not want my license plate read…. hi, by the way! 🙂
Looks like a fun project, but it kinda makes my hair stand on end. Can you get a photo of that? 😎
I have been thinking about a good open source project for quite awhile. The one that I thought of several years back was the use of a camera or two to measure the speed of cars in a neighborhood and report offenders with a photograph of the car and its license plate, a velocity, and a license plate number. Imagine mothers who have people speeding past their children at 50 MPH in a neighborhood. Wouldn’t it be nice to know who these people are?
There is another commercial use aimed at drive-through coffee shops and laundries to give the people a heads up about who is at the window so the proprietor could provide the customer with more personal and faster service.
I am open to the idea that I might be wrong to do this. It is done ubiquitously already, but that does not make it right.
Wendy–down about ten pounds now. I am waiting to be in one place with a scale long enough to start posting again.
Sounds like a good application – I don’t know that there is a “rightness” or “wrongness” to it, but I think we are all much more comfortable keeping our heads in the sand regarding our perceived anonymity. I admit I would rather be a “user” than a “usee”.