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Comment by someotheridiot | Hacker News Reader

Hey, I built this site and just noticed the traffic. If anyone has questions, ask away :) A better starting url is https://rebrickable.com/

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Did you or anyone you know work on the obvious issue of cataloging the vast piles of legos out kids have using computer vision / AI? Cataloging inventory by hand is so discouraging. Ps. I didn’t check but I assume I can just upload some CSV with what parts I have etc? The issue is that doing it by hand sounds like a nightmare. Any ideas of attempts to auto scan parts on the floor and giving some estimate at least using open CV etc? (I should Google it first before asking probably...)

Edit: are solutions like this practical, or it’s easier to just sort by hand?

https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-learning-lego-image-r...

If your question is about getting the contents of a Lego set, it is easier than it used to be.

First, every building instruction manual these days has the full inventory of pieces on the last pages.

Second, you can download a PDF of the instruction without owning the set. For example on page 43 on this one https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions/7519...

Depends what you mean by "practical". Assuming you've done CV/ML stuff before, you could probably get something working pretty well over a weekend, and I think I could solve it completely with a bit more effort via 3D scanning + synthetic dataset generation... but unless you have cubic meters of lego to sort, doing it by hand would be faster, albeit less fun.

There have been several attempts that I know of. But they all tend to have a low number of categories they sort into - tens vs the thousands of actual categories that exist.

I have tried it myself and it simply needs more input data (ie photos). However, that is something I might follow up on later as I can fairly easily get more data just by asking my community :)

Is this a passion project or a business? How did you get started? And are you very into Lego?

Bonus question, what did you think of the Lego Masters series that started last year?

It started off as a side-project for fun, now has grown so large it's my primary income. Unfortunately it hasn't left me with enough spare time to enjoy LEGO much though.

My kids enjoyed LEGO Masters (Australia), and it certainly seemed to bring some new people to the site.

Standard questions: how does the backend look like and what frameworks did you use for frontent and backend?