The FL!P

• 

  Image from Raspberry Pi Camera

Inspiration

A couple of weeks ago, one of our members severely needed to read chapters for his homework but also was so tired and wanted to rest his eyes. With a short time constraint, all he wanted was a device to read his textbook so he could rest in bed. Thus, began our journey building the Flip.

What it does

The Flip is a device that scans your book for you and turns the print text into audio. The device will then flip the pages of the textbook automatically to have a continuous read of the textbook without the need of manual changing. We used CAD to design a device that includes a servo attached to the wheel and a servo attached to the lever to lift the page up and flip it. The elevated camera then takes a picture and send the information to the Raspberry Pi. It then calls an API, and turns the text into audio. The audio can be listened through with an audiojack.

Challenges I ran into

During our build we encountered some troubles with calibrating some of the mechanical components. Since we were 3D print all our parts, a lot the alignment was difficult. In addition, we were restricted on materials, especially with the camera. The RasPiStill camera was the only camera available but it didn't have autofocus. We completed almost 50 test to figure out the right focus.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Even with so many challenges, we were still able to overcome them and make a working product. We are so proud that we made such a complex system that relies on so many parts to operate. We learned a lot through this process, figuring out text to speech, electronic circuit design, API, among other technical skills. Most of all, we learned that a good team can get us through hard and sleepy times.

What's next for The FL!P

Due to the time constraint, we still have lots of advancements we want to add to The Flip. In the future, we'd like to fully implement the foldable compact Flip, Bluetooth to a gesture remote and speaker to be controlled from anywhere, and firmware updates you can push remotely.

Built With

• bash
• camera
• google-cloud-vision
• gpio
• linux
• microsoft-text-to-speech
• natural-language-processing
• python
• raspberry-pi
• servo