For our senior ECE design at Cornell, my partner and I created a portable face recognition system. To our knowledge, it’s the first face recognition system on a microcontroller. You enroll with one button and log in with another. You can build our system for about $30 and then use it to control access to anything: a safe, a door, or the beer fridge. In our demo video, we just output to an LCD for feedback instead of actually controlling access to something. See the website I provided for more detail.
This was a final project for Cornell’s ECE 4760 (Designing with Microcontrollers). This is a senior design course. There are a bunch of other cool hack/gadget projects from other groups, which you can browse here.
One of the best thing about the yearly Cornell projects is they’re all documented, source code is posted, everything – fantastic work!
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
