Student reveals the origins of his real-life Portal turret | Hacker News Reader

Student reveals the origins of his real-life Portal turret

venturebeat.com

48 pointsmarcieoum10 comments

It's a very nice hardware design, but it's certainly nothing groundbreaking--some of my classmates did the same thing for their senior project, having a nerf turret shoot at any moving object of a certain color (I believe they used a toy schoolbus, which in retrospect seems a slightly odd choice).

Still, it's a very spiffy design!

Since it seems like they are having a computer do the image analysis, background subtraction on the image processing end of things seems like it would yield much better results. Since a turret can only point at one place anyways, they don't necessarily need to pick out a single entity, so aiming at the place of last movement would aim at anything without the need of a red shirt.

Yeah, it's what the guy in Militarizing Your Backyard with Python[1][2] did, using OpenCV, and that could target squirrels in a natural environment.

[1]: http://pyvideo.org/video/674/militarizing-your-backyard-with...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3710107

Great project, although it might have been a good idea for them to check out using the Microsoft Kinect and Point Cloud Library (It's like OpenCV for depth cameras! http://pointclouds.org/). With the 3D data you could account for the trajectory of the missiles, for example.

Cue 'I will give my firstborn child' posts. This looks like a really fun project to work on. You have various ways of perfecting it and you know people on the internet are drooling over it.

I bet you could build a really rough version of this in a week :). A polished version in a month.

The lag is pretty bad -- so no worries about any very high end CV stuff. I haven't used it, but look at OpenCV.

I actually built the image analysis bits for something that could do this a few years ago using [naively] Puthon Image Library. I was using it to take pictures of my dog while I was at work, but pointing something at her wOuldnt be a problem.

In fact, you could build a very simLe sentry turret like this using a couPle of servos and an arduino.

This is a cool project, but never feel like it's out of your reach :)

I'm not the person saying that I will give my firstborn child :P. I wouldn't feel as if it's out of reach should I desire to do it though. I'm not overly critical on prototypes!

I'd suggest using openFrameworks (openframeworks.cc) with which you can easily hook up a Microsoft Kinect and control the Arduino via serial.

Lag is pretty bad :P

This is amazing! Wonder how hard it was to make?

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