Candle-Blower

Discord bot that blows candles on a birthday cake

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Inspiration

  • Baked a cake for your friend's birthday, but celebrating it remotely?
  • Candle-Blower allows your friend to make a wish and blow the candles from your ca ke despite being anywhere in the world
  • All with a simple discord message

What it does

  • Your friend sends a message blow in your discord chat
  • The discord bot recognizes the message and starts turning a fan
  • It watches the candle and stops blowing once the candle goes out

How we built it

  • Built a discord bot in Python
  • Interfaced bot with motor and camera hardware using a Raspberry Pi
  • Designed fan propeller using SOLIDWORKS computer aided drawing (CAD) software and printed using a 3D printer
  • Processed images for deep learning using OpenCV: a computer vision library
  • Trained a deep convolutional neural network to detect if candle has gone out using TensorFlow

Challenges we ran into

  • The 3D printer broke and we had to fix it before being able to print the propeller
  • We had to learn how to interface deep learning, discord bots and hardware on a raspberry pi together as we had never done this before
  • We also ran into compatability issues with TensorFlow between our training computer and the Raspberry Pi

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Designing and printing an effective fan propeller within a weekend
  • Controlling hardware using computer programs
  • Creating and training a deep learning model with data we collected and processed ourselves

What we learned

  • This was our first real computer vision with deep learning project
    • We learned that for computer vision processing the image (removing background, removing certain colours, etc.) is much more important than creating a huge deep learning network
  • Fixing the 3D printer gave us a much deeper understanding of the 3D printing process
  • Using a Rasberry Pi taught us how hardware and code mesh together

What's next for Candle-Blower

  • Designing a more powerful fan
  • Adding a speaker that sings Happy Birthday
  • Making the deep learning model more accurate

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