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Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @02:04PM (#20978541)
Crazy how often this has been posted to HN.
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by NicoJuicy on Sunday September 15, 2019 @03:03PM (#20978898)
I think it's one of the 2 examples where Machine Learning actually was seen usefull as DIY-project.

The other one is with a cucumber farm: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/how-a-japanese-cu...

Fyi: The real reason why i posted it, is that suddenly your RSS feeds on your website work again i suppose :P

So all your items on your blog are suddenly in my list again :)

That and ... it's an awesome story :p

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @03:19PM (#20978972)
> The real reason why i posted it, is that suddenly your RSS feeds on your website work again i suppose :P

I fixed a minor bug in my Hugo setup and posted a new article, that's probably the reason why that changed. Now I still need to go fix the images on older posts. No rest for the wicked!

My current project also has ML in it; music, MIDI, programming, what's not to like :)?

I'm very much unsure about whether or not I will be able to get it to work though, I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by NicoJuicy on Sunday September 15, 2019 @03:32PM (#20979048)
Ahhh, yes. It could be that the URL or Unique Id changed of the feed.

No worries for the images though, as i'm not using that ( but i could)

http://handlr.sapico.me/ :p

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by bigiain on Monday September 16, 2019 @02:14AM (#20981521)
Can confirm, Feedly handed me a bunch of older posts as unread along with the "Briefcase" on earlier today...
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by OrgNet on Sunday September 15, 2019 @03:44PM (#20979114)
BTW: The search feature on your site sends the query over HTTP (missing the S).
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:00PM (#20979185)
Thank you, I will fix that.

edit: it should be working correctly now. Make sure you refresh the page first.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by OrgNet on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:50PM (#20979426)
works fine now, thanks
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by StavrosK on Sunday September 15, 2019 @03:50PM (#20979142)
What's the current project? I've been wanting to post one of mine for the past few years, but I never get around to it...
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:01PM (#20979191)
Trying to create a very patient (and cheap) piano teacher. I realize it will never be a substitute for a real teacher but if it gets me 50% there that's already quite neat. But this is much harder than I thought it would be.
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by NicoJuicy on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:31PM (#20979322)
Lol, i was thinking about the usefullness of Music, MIDI and AI. That i have no relation to it.

BUT, this is probably the only thing that i want to do with Music - learning how to play the piano.

Nice one!

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by StavrosK on Sunday September 15, 2019 @10:51PM (#20980741)
What's hard about it? Can you share some more details? Are you using a led strip on the keys?
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @11:01PM (#20980781)
Polyphonic sound decomposition is pretty much an open problem. I have an 'interesting' idea on how to solve it. I'm sure I'll be accused of cheating if I get it to work ;)
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by StavrosK on Sunday September 15, 2019 @11:08PM (#20980801)
Oh, that's true (Melodyne made a plug in that will do it, AFAIK). Can't you do something else, like optically or mechanically read the keys? Do you even need to read them? I guess you want to tell people if they made a mistake, hmm...

Something you could do would be IR LEDs and an IR camera, where the LEDs are only reflected on the shiny keys when they're pressed due to the angle.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @11:13PM (#20980817)
Hehe, 'why don't you' :)

Yes, there are many use cases that I have in mind where this is a must. In fact, if I can't crack it then it's a useless project (other than that I will learn from it).

There are all kinds of devices that could give you midi inputs (such as the 'Piano Bar', sadly discontinued), but that's the easy way out. After all, you could also simply use a MIDI enabled keyboard. But I want it to work with a real piano, as well as possibly other instruments.

The best software for this at the moment is Anthemscore.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by StavrosK on Sunday September 15, 2019 @11:46PM (#20980929)
Hmm, very true. Do you want it to not require modifications to the piano? I guess that would mean that you pretty much need to do sound decomposition...
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Monday September 16, 2019 @01:09AM (#20981246)
Yes, zero hardware changes or mods to the piano. I think that would be a dealbreaker for many people. It also means that the barrier to entry would be much lower.
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by StavrosK on Monday September 16, 2019 @01:12AM (#20981266)
Hmm, yes, if you can get it to work with just sound, that would be trivial to set up. If not, I think the light idea would still be valuable, as technically you wouldn't be changing the piano (just adding a camera and light above it).
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Monday September 16, 2019 @01:34AM (#20981373)
I've actually toyed around with that idea, one interesting application would be to convert Rousseau style youtube videos back into midi.

I'm quite sure it is possible but it would still require a lot of set-up. The microphone is such a temptingly simple target that it makes sense to pursue that one first.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by StavrosK on Monday September 16, 2019 @01:37AM (#20981386)
That makes sense (although the microphone is only a simple target if you ignore the unknown unknown of deconstructing the sound :P). I'm very much looking forward to your progress!
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by sorenjan on Sunday September 15, 2019 @10:59PM (#20980774)
I liked "counting bees on a rasp pi with a conv net" too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103635

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by bmking on Sunday September 15, 2019 @02:24PM (#20978667)
It's exactly the kind of things I hope to see every now on then on Hacker News! :)
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @02:28PM (#20978684)
I should set it up again and give a live demo one of these days. It's lots of fun to watch it work. At least once every week someone mails me about it. The bulk of these are wantrepreneurs who have suddenly seen the light and want to take the project over, and who think I'm gullible enough to believe their cover stories (5 minutes of Googling usually turns up a commercial operation). Can't blame them for trying to corner the market I guess.

Meanwhile, the consultancy I've been running for the last 12 years is growing up, rapidly. We just named our first CEO (other than me), who will hopefully take it to the next level so who knows, I just might have some free time again in the near future. Here's to hoping.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by sbierwagen on Sunday September 15, 2019 @02:41PM (#20978764)
Did you ever sell any of the sorted Lego?
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @02:49PM (#20978806)
Yes, quite a bit actually, mostly to the United States and to one fellow here in NL that was building a huge castle.

https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1016382615417389057

Amazing accomplishment, he surveyed the building just prior to demolition with a drone and then built the whole thing without a single drawing.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by gus_massa on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:09PM (#20979226)
For comparison:

Some photos of the castle: https://www.davidbakerphotography.com/location-history/resid... (see in particular one near the bottom)

About the demolition: https://www.byronhartshorn.com/2017/05/31/chateau-de-noisy-i...

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:13PM (#20979241)
That would have been one case where 'eminent domain' would have been a good solution.

It's a real pity to see such an iconic building go to waste. The demolition story tries to spin it hard as though the family had no other option, but of course they did: if they were unable to be good stewards of the property then they could have donated it to the Belgian state.

But after looting it for anything valuable it is of course much better to have a white-wash story out there about how those urban explorers violated the privacy of the owners (never mind the fact that it had been abandoned for years and that there was plenty of damage from neglect alone).

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by gus_massa on Sunday September 15, 2019 @07:53PM (#20980173)
I made a image search in Google and picked the two that looked more nice/relevant. It's a pity that the building was destroyed.
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by bigiain on Monday September 16, 2019 @02:17AM (#20981526)
I bought some! (Thanks Jacques!!!)
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by iRobbery on Sunday September 15, 2019 @03:30PM (#20979035)
Congrats :)
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @03:33PM (#20979050)
Thank you. Doing anything for a long time is hard, I can't wait to be free again to do other stuff. In 2016 when I did this project I still had lots of free time, we did 11 tech due dilligences that year. In 2017 there were 18, in 2018 43 and this year we will likely end up somewhere between 60 and 80 so it long ago surpassed what one person can do.

It is surprisingly hard to scale a one-man show.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by ChuckMcM on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:48PM (#20979412)
I agree with Nico its got a lot to like, it is very approachable and doesn't imply access to a lot of hard to get/use equipment. So good stuff.

Now you need sub-sorters :-) I always kept my technic stuff sorted by various parts (large gears, medium gears, small gears, motors, axles, wheels, etc)

Another interesting project would be a 'pick a part' machine that used an arm and image recognition to select parts from bins and assemble a 'kit' (all the parts needed to make a particular thing)

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:56PM (#20979448)
> Now you need sub-sorters

The main limitations is to be able to sort into only 12 bins in one pass. If you want more detail or more groups then you need more passes. Ideally it would sort into a few hundred bins at once but I have not been able to come up with a geometry that works well. The most radical idea would be a tower of 2 meters high or so with bins spaced around it like flower petals, the air jet would have to be timed super precisely to aim the part into the right bin, especially near the bottom where the velocity would be quite high.

Pick a part is easier, the software is trivial but the hardware is anything but, an 'automated warehouse' for Lego parts would be a pretty tricky thing from a mechanical point of view.

And once you're on that train of thought, the obvious end-game is a machine that re-assembles the sets, then we can declare Lego a 'solved problem'.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by StavrosK on Sunday September 15, 2019 @05:17PM (#20979535)
Do you use relays for the blowers? Can you use MOSFETs for more accuracy?
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @05:27PM (#20979584)
Hm, never even thought that that might be a factor. Yes, it uses relays. I'm not sure how much belt travel will be off because of that, but given that it would be a constant it would likely already be accounted for a an offset to 'center of part' which is where I try to hit the parts to make sure they don't spin like mad.
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by StavrosK on Sunday September 15, 2019 @10:50PM (#20980733)
That sounds reasonable, where you may have more luck with something more accurate is if you had to run the blower for a shorter time, or maybe pulse it to lower the wind speed (I'm not sure if that's possible).
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @11:02PM (#20980787)
The relay pulses are about 50 msec, that's mostly limited to ensure there is enough air to rapidly hit multiple bins in a short time, as well as to be able to 'pick out' a part from two adjacent parts on the belt without hitting the other two. That took a while to get right!
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by bigiain on Monday September 16, 2019 @02:13AM (#20981515)
That's because it's _Awesome!_

(A more cynical man than myself might assumed the entire project was intentionally and exclusively created to appeal to the HN audience...)

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Monday September 16, 2019 @02:14AM (#20981520)
Haha, that would have been an expensive mistake!
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by secabeen on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:58PM (#20979457)
Have you ever posted the code? I would totally try implementing this, as the hardware work is something I can do, but my programming skills are rusty enough that I don't think I can write the code. I'd love to see other people try to build and improve on it.
Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by jacquesm on Sunday September 15, 2019 @05:31PM (#20979599)
No, I was planning to and then every 2 bit Lego trader and bricklink contacted me to try to go commercial with it. That's not how I envision this and so I decided to keep it inside for now. A ton of work went into labeling the dataset (many 10's of thousands of images), and there is no way I will let the likes of Bricklink and overpriced parts sellers use it to corner the market.

This is very much a mom-and-pop market, and there are countless people out there that augment their pensions by sorting Lego by hand and re-selling it.

Releasing this would put them out of business overnight, or, they'd have a grace period as long as someone does not put together industrial mechanics for it and then it is 'game over'.

Re:Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) by secabeen on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @01:15PM (#20997607)
Fair enough. I guess I'll have to figure it out myself. :D