Google does pretty good job at crawling the web, fast enough to accommodate Billions of webpages, everyday. For the offline PC searches, Google Desktop finds every needle in the haystack.
But what about your Home? Ever wished that you could index your home and find stuff you misplaced within seconds?
The unofficial project called “Google Bot” or “Gåågle Bot“ to the rescue. The Swedish author claims that it is a “home crawler” which is nothing but a vacuum roomba hacked to have on-board tiny webserver and a camera. Vauum Roomba crawls around doing it’s basic job of vacuuming the floor, while doing so it takes a large number of photos of various location s inside house. It then uses an OCR (Optical character recognition) Engine to change it into indexable Text. This text is later put in a database on the roomba and is “fully searchable” through a web interface.
To give you an idea of what you can do with it: It can index your bookshelf, boxes, magazines, sign labels, almost everything that is observable from the floor. So the next time you lost your book ask Google Bot.
You can checkout the search here.
GåågleEye is fully automated, does it’s job quiet well, and even can be overriden to do the task you ask it to. It can remote controlled in realtime using AJAX based webapplication which shows you roomba’s eye view through camera. Awesome stuff, while you are away from home and some guests are expected to showup, clean it up all before anyone else sees it. Apart fromt hat, good for survellience of Home while you are away, or to have an eye on babysitter, other stuff. Author himself used it when his son was born.
So what all is it built on?
- Roomba Vacuum cleaner
- Mini Computer: gumstix (a very small Linux computer) with a wifi (802.11b) card
- Camera: a C328 digital camera
- Interface: a simple homebrewn circuit that lets the Camera, Gumstix and Roomba communicate (TTL/Serial level conversion)
- OCR: Transym OCR
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