Tired of that smug look of satisfaction on your kid’s face when they’re able to find Waldo on a page faster than you can? A creative agency called RedPepper built a robot that levels the Where’s Waldo playing field using a camera and machine learning AI to spot the striped traveler in as little as four-and-a-half seconds. Looks like you’re out of a job, little Billy.
Once the robot arm is in place, it snaps a high-res photo of a two-page Where’s Waldo spread, and analyzes it for recognizable cartoon human faces using the OpenCV computer vision programming tools. To actually spot Waldo, the robot’s designers trained Google’s Cloud AutoML machine learning tool on a relatively small collection of 107 Waldo head and body images.
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
