Dry erase board lined with IR sensors to record pen strokes [video] | Hacker News Reader

Dry erase board lined with IR sensors to record pen strokes [video]

youtube.com

197 pointsarey_abhishek64 comments

My high school had these in 1995. Each marker color had a different reflective pattern on a band around the tip so the scanning laser could read it like a bar code. I remember the eraser having a solid reflective band all the way around. It was pretty cool, as we all got whiteboard "transcripts" emailed to us at the end of the class that you could play back / pause / rewind / etc... whenever you wanted.

Also, these boards had no projectors (they used real ink in the markers) and didn't require special markers (just the barcoded pen collars, which were removable)

And the erasers were circular, so that their rotation wasn't significant and didn't need to be known by the software.

Yes!

Also had one of these in high school, but connected to an uplink for a distance learning setup. There were about 20 of us in the actual classroom, and then 3 or 4 other classrooms would get the same whiteboard feed live.

OP here. If you'd like to see a kickstarter project out of this, please upvote this comment!

Not that you asked, but here are some ways I think you could go about releasing this to the public and make some money off of it (only one method uses Kickstarter):

1. You could do a Kickstarter where you sold a kit that you sourced with hardware from Alibaba and code you wrote yourself. This would be a lot of effort, but could be fairly profitable if the KS succeeds.

2. You could release some how to instructions on how people can make their own panel, and charge for software. You don't even need KS for this, just a PayPal (or other money transfer company) account.

3. You could release your code on GitHub for free and let people pay you out of the kindness of their hearts, either through PayPal, Patreon, or Gratipay.

> 3. You could release your code on GitHub for free and let people pay you out of the kindness of their hearts, either through PayPal, Patreon, or Gratipay.

Please don't do this, you will starve. Very few people are able to make enough money from open source in this way and I don't think this is the kind of thing that's suited to it.

Commercialize this technology, market it, sell it.

Exactly. Corporate and university shops often come off like the rich-yet-freeloader archetype whom goes to the donation-based museum or listens to NPR but never puts anything in... with loads of cash they can afford easily afford it, but they won't it if they can have their maintenance folks can put it together for "free."

The main considerations revolve around:

a. Is it patentable? (OP should contact a former USPTO examiner or a reputable legal shop like Orrick.) Provisional patent a minimum, seems a must, or it's not worth going forward if Mr. Wonderful can knock it off in China.

b. Is it worth the effort to source and offer components which are commodities? Some folks want "batteries included" and will pay for it, so mark those up to where it makes sense to make it worth the while.

Disclaimer: I've worked inside ivy school research and non-research depts and enterprise shops too.

I like #2 & #3 options better than doing a KS. Going to think about this. Thanks, appreciate this.

I could see a product like this with handwriting recognition software for transcripts and the ability to sync with Evernote and other services as very popular in the corporate world.

If you think about the man hours wasted transcribing notes from lengthy whiteboard sessions, you could make a pretty solid ROI argument to execs: "Shorten your meetings, let your employees pay attention, automatically self-document all meetings for future reuse."

You make orders of magnitude more money through Kickstarter than either of the other options. Much more stress too admittedly.

Another payment option for #2 and #3 is Bitcoin.

You need to add your contact in your HN profile. Tried to contact you for notification when it goes on kickstarter.

Please don't listen to all the naysayers (I was about to be one of them) who are saying this has "already been done." Sure, they are right. But is there one in every room of every office? No. But there could be.

The thing that has changed between back then when this stuff was first done and now, is that everybody has smartphones. The old dinosaur systems aren't priced to take this into account.

Agreed. Doing something for the first time, vs doing it well enough for adoption, or in a way that is more accessible is a creation itself.

If this was a frame or a kit I could attach to an existing board, I'd be ordering it right now. Shipping whiteboards is expensive so I hope that might be an option.

As the Apple Pencil has demonstrated again, most new things aren't always quite new. There's few form factor, interface, or screen innovations. What will be new is new ways to create using what we have.

Where you come across them, Naysayers are usually self-doubting doubt worshippers. Every person with unimpressed input should be taken with a grain of salt relative to how much a person feels the only thing of value is if it's something new or novel.

If you are interested in a full commercial version of this (sharing an analog whiteboard with a link), check out http://smartkapp.com

(Disclosure: Am employee of said company)

Ouch, I know that when you see someone has already created a product that you are working on you should take it as a validation of your idea and not become discouraged. However, seeing this I can't help feeling bad for the OP. The OP has a prototype, while this (seems) like a fully fledged and very slick product with all bases covered and it is even cheap.

$900-1200 isn't what I'd call "cheap" (OP says parts for their prototype is around $150).

Also, another person in this thread mentioned a 42" one from China thats $120 [1]. That is more in the "cheap" range.

[1] http://goo.gl/N02wRa

If parts for your prototype are around $150, most conventional electronic product pricing wisdom would put this at around $600-$750 retail.

If the OP hasn't done research into potential/current competitors then the OP shouldn't be taking it further than a prototype anyway.

It definitely sucks to prototype something that already exists, but it's probably a good lesson too.

Since the company seems to be a hardware company, I'm curious, is any of the software open source?

This is cool as a DIY project, but digital whiteboards have been around since at least 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Board

All the previous whiteboards force you to buy a projector or invest in smart pens. This costs ~150USD to make vs. 1500USD+ for the kind of smart boards that existed in the past.

You get 42" versions from China for USD$118 each. I'd focus on the software improvements and benefits.

http://goo.gl/N02wRa

you could probably connect this to rPi to make it smart/connected.

It's probably using some no-name USB HID driver so yes, it will look like a mouse to a Linux system as long as the udev tables match up. Might need some tweaking to handle the multi-touch stuff.

I wouldn't say it requires a projector or smart pens. My school had both the "official" smart board most people know, but also a model of whiteboard that used IR sensors and regular pens.

I don't know how expensive they were, as they still were a commercial product sold to schools, but they didn't need a projector or smart pens

I forget the name, but I worked at a place ~1997 that had one that I'm pretty sure used regular board and pens. It had two bar-like devices affixed to a side and along the top of the board.

I remember that product. It seemed like a good idea, but it just couldn't keep up with writing at normal speed so we gave up on it. (You also had to put a special collar on the otherwise normal markers.)

Yes, the collars! I remember it had a kind of kiddie-name and maybe some blob-type design elements.

Ah, this is a key piece of information, and indeed sounds like quite a big deal.

You should mention it in your presentation!

The one at my high school (admittedly, over a decade ago) was ridiculously expensive, though. If this is cheap, it could be pretty great for a cash-strapped startup, striking the balance between a smart board and a person with a cellphone snapping photos.

(The expensiveness of the whiteboard made it even funnier when a teacher used a Sharpie permanent marker on it one day.)

ethanol or methanol will clean it up.

Or a white board pen. Just paint over it with an erasable pen, and it will all go when wiped.

One tip from someone that has worked with IR emitters/detectors: make sure your product can handle direct and reflected sunlight.

I'd hate to see you getting all the way through a kickstarter and then finding out you need to rework your frame to reject ambient and stray IR.

Don't these types of systems always use AC modulation for just that reason?

Usually. Not always.

Fairly neat. Consider the listing status of the video. Right now it is discouraging people from sharing.

Changed the status to public

Here's a poor man's version that uses <$50 of hardware (a wii remote and an ir led)

If anyone's interested in playing around with it I'll put up some nicer usage instructions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX8JnC7-K8k

https://github.com/liamuk/Omniboard

i'm interested... i looked at your site, but didn't see any more info on it... thanks!

Is this working on a similar system to Optical touchscreen technology? Did you build the ir sensors into the edge of the glass or at the surface?

http://www.planar.com/media/111012/touch_technologies_white_...

Different technology. This is what we've used: http://www.touchscreen-me.com/technologies-comparison-infrar... Same result can be achieved with CMOS sensors mounted on the corners as well but ambient lighting conditions affect the way the board works.

Out of interest, I was looking at one of the IR touchscreen frames you linked to.

The control boards seem to vary in terms of the number of touch points they can monitor.

So I'm wondering how you distinguish between a marker pen and the larger whiteboard eraser.

Is it possible to access the raw output from the IR sensors I wonder.

Virtual Ink, anyone? http://www.mimio.com/en-NA.aspx Think about how much fun it will be to try to sell expensive stuff to schools and colleges before you raise a lot of money for this.

Schools love spending tons of money on crap like this, instead of paying teachers. Blackboard is a huge company in this space.

Really impressive. Must be pretty sensitive IR sensors to not have false detections when the marker/eraser gets close to the board but doesn't touch it. Any info on the hardware and software stack?

Thanks. If the pen is about 2mm off the surface, there is a false positive. Also haven't done palm rejection yet, so your palm needs to be off the board to write.

I used an off the shelf IR touch frame bought from Aliexpress: http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=AS... All touch inputs fed into Raspbery PI with a wifi dongle.

Looks like it did actually have an FP+ on the eraser there if you compare the phone to what he actually erased onscreen.

I'll second the request for more info though!

The eraser did actually touch the board, but appears like it didn't because of the reflective surface. :)

couldn't we have a webcam to stream/record the video? or perhaps capture snapshots? If needed we might subtract the human from the video stream using some basic machine vision techniques.

Exactly my thoughts when I saw this. The problem with writer obstructing the view can be solved by place the camera behind the board and using a translucent white plastic sheet for the board. If the front of the board is illuminated well, then the camera shouldn't have any problems in capturing the stuff being written on the translucent board. Mirror the image in software and you are done!

I imagine the human's hand would be obstructing active areas of the board a large percentage of the time

Looked like it was zoomed in on the written part. I wonder if it would gradually zoom out, as you write more, or if you could scroll around on the display to see the rest of the writing.

I remember my dad having something very similar in his office when I was a kid. You could write on it like a normal white board then it would print out a copy of it for you.

Very cool DIY project.

Without details of price or advantage over existing tech I don't see it as a fundable/kickstartable effort... but good luck.

Hey arey_abhishek I am an investor and have been looking to invest in a product like this! Let's talk! DM me @sidsays on Twitter.

Impressive. What platform did you build this on?

It'd be nice to do something similar to this on one of those cheap $200-300 40" TVs that go on sale sometimes (the kind that have very bad visual quality, but could reasonably display large high contrast text, and crude lines), and just record where a stylus is and make an extra cheap and ghetto pen TV out of it.

I want one. Seems like you're saying we can't buy it currently?

very cool.

practically thinking, why not buy a large touch screen and use some sort of stylus instead of this white board?

in both cases, the user needs to buy special hardware. so i would think the costs would be comparable.

genuine question, not diminishing your work

A 85inch DIY whiteboard will cost about 500$ to make while the MSFT surface hub costs 19,999$.

comparably large touch screens are going to be order(s) of magnitude more expensive than this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com