Recent Posts

4951

N.A.N.Y. 2016 / Re: NANY 2016 Release: Automatic Screenshotter - v1.06 - May 7, 2017

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 07:37 PM »

This should do it:


(and make sure you have capturing enabled when you exit the program -- it will try to startup in the same state it exited).

ps.
if this doesn't work for you let me know!

4952

N.A.N.Y. 2016 / Re: NANY 2016 Release: Automatic Screenshotter - v1.06 - May 7, 2017

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 07:19 PM »

There's an option to start with computer startup.

4953

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 01:17 PM »

Well there's no reason that the lens curve has to be the entire "cup".. the lens could simply be the BOTTOM of a more pronounced and sharper dimple in the bottom of the container that spins.

Think of the spinner as being formed from two of these, where the bottom of the cup is the lens, and the two cups are attached at their wider mouths.



And of course there is no reason the container has to be symmetrical.  you could have the sharp-sloped cup on one and and more of a half-sphere on the other (like an ice cream cone) -- whatever would better tumble the die.  The key thing is that when the cup end comes to rest, it constrain the die to a very narrow region on the base.  That has 2 advantages: First, it centers it above camera more narrowly, and second, it means less clearance distance needed so the bottom of the cup can be closer to camera.

4954

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 12:59 PM »

yeah something like that could work, driven by a motor.
Especially if the bottom funneled the (single) die down to a smaller more predictable area. having a smaller (say 1-2 inch diameter) bottom area (think of a CUP shape or upside-down cone), it would be able to rest closer to bottom of base.

That does seem to offer a fairly reliable way of shaking up the die too.

4955

Living Room / Re: Share your photos! Travel shots, photoblogs, etc.

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 12:19 PM »

wow, those are phenomenal photographs.  how were they taken/processed?

4956

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 12:07 PM »

I have one of these cheap $10 dicer roller toys on order -- if it can be modified it's hard to imagine a cheaper solution:
http://www.amazon.co...wered/dp/B0079RKBGK/



I believe the basic mechanism is that the bottom SPINS, and friction causes the dice to tumble around.

4957

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 12:04 PM »

Clearly I need a clever engineer to take on the hardware half of this.. Anyone up for it? With a prototype we could kickstart it

4958

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 11:38 AM »

one thing we have to consider is that the sharp cornered dice are going to be bouncing around on their containers really hard, over and over and over, thousands of times.. another argument against having camera facing up through a glass surface that the dice are going to be scratching against..

4959

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 10:39 AM »

So one difficulty with having the camera on the BOTTOM facing up, is figuring out a mechanism to roll/tumble the die that would still allow it to sit flat on the nice clear glass at the bottom.

4960

Living Room / MakeUseOf recommends 3 price comparison browser extensions

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 08:14 AM »

Three browser extensions are recommended in this short article.

I haven't checked them out yet -- personally I do most of my shopping on amazon.com and I have been very happy with CamelCamelCamel for tracking prices there.

The first method is to compare the price between two stores immediately. The second way is to compare the price right now with the price at a different time. After all, the price you see right now may not be the best possible price for a product at any given time. Heck, if an item is expected to go on sale in a week, it makes sense to wait for the discount. The third and final way is to compare a new item’s price against a used one.

http://www.makeuseof...ions-to-install-now/

While we're on the subject, you know what would be nice? A way to filter out commercial high-volume sellers from ebay search results...

4961

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2016, 07:11 AM »

ive split off the latest post in this topic and moved it to the basement; if there are particularly family inappropriate posts on this thread they should go to that thread.

4962

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2016, 04:05 PM »

I was thinking camera from the bottom using lightly smoked glass might make the extra non-relevant - yet visible - faces easier to ignore.

i don't know enough about optics, but maybe someone who does could shed some light on the question of whether it's possible to create a glass "surface" (lens?) that had the effect of making something the details of an object laying flat against it very clear, but rapidly blurring anything that was even a couple of millimeters away...

to some extent, some of the privacy films you can put on glass has an effect in the same vein -- but this would have much more precise requirements..

4963

Screenshot Captor / Re: Signature flagged as corrupt & 'Rotate' distorts and scales objects

« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2016, 03:54 PM »

I was able to reproduce your crop-with-border effects bug.. will fix!

4964

Screenshot Captor / Re: Signature flagged as corrupt & 'Rotate' distorts and scales objects

« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2016, 03:50 PM »

Ok looks like you found a bug with rotation and sizing combined, i will fix!

4965

Screenshot Captor / Re: Signature flagged as corrupt & 'Rotate' distorts and scales objects

« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2016, 03:49 PM »

First of all, thank you Puchai for posting so sweetly 

Ok now to address.. I heard before about signature of file and thought that I concluded it was due to my code signing certificate being an older sha algorithm that MS and others are starting to flag as needing an upgrade.  It's such a pain to upgrade that i've put it off but will be upgrading soon.  It is a little odd that you aren't getting the same error on other files, but i suppose that depends on which files you check..

Next reply will address the other points.

4966

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2016, 01:37 PM »

i definitely need to experiment with camera from bottom facing up.

in fact i was wondering if it wouldnt be possible to use some kind of closing aperature ring on top surface that would simultaneously center the die AND block out all but the bottom-facing die face.. though that seems a bit far fetched.

4967

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2016, 12:15 PM »

And here's a screenshot of the tool running in "guessing" mode with that same die.

On the top left you see the live camers image, with inset view of the extracted foreground facing die label.
On the bottom left you see the training image for the 20 that the program saw in a previous labeling/training stage.
Note that it has ONE photo of EACH die face that it uses as it's prototype -- there is no training procedure per se, it's just one example of each die face.  In fact as you can see in this case, it's not even of the same die, just another d20 with similar font.

Then on right hand side you see the results of trying to match against it's stored set of 20 prototypes, showing the top 4 candidate matches, rotated and scaled in an attempt to find the best aligning match.  The right-hand window of each pair shows the "difference mask" after some processing.  So you can see how the "20" is the best match -- which you can see reported at the bottom. (confidence score reflects the difference between best match score and next-best match score).

4968

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2016, 12:01 PM »

Here's a screenshot showing the tool extracting the foreground label of a "camoflaged" die.

For dice with clear foreground vs background contrast, an automatic thresholding filter is used to automatically separate foreground from background, but with "noisy" colored die, the user must "calibrate" the die by clicking on a pixel in the camera image that is part of the foreground label.    At that point the system finds the major colors in the image (k-means clustering) to quantize colors (about 8 classes works fine) in the LAB colorspace, and identifies foreground as color-quantized pixels closest to the foreground color.

With foreground pixels identified, the shape of the die (and other tunable per-die-type parameters) are used to try to identify only the top die face and exclude any foreground labeling/graphics which are on side faces.  This can be tricky, and works best if die is fairly well centered under the camera.  Certain dice shapes are harder than others because they have irregular shapes (d10 for example).  In the screenshot below you can see the white circle on the 3rd image from the bottom left indicating the area in which the program expects the current die fact to be circumscribed.  This case is fairly simple -- but there are cases where it's non-trivial to determine when a label belongs to the front die face or a neighboring one.

4969

Living Room / Re: What other forums do you participate in?

« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2016, 10:11 AM »

BGG ! another one of my fave sites.

what's your username? here's me: https://boardgamegeek.com/user/dcmouser

4970

Living Room / What other forums do you participate in?

« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2016, 06:42 AM »

Have we ever asked this before.. What other forums on the internet do you participate in?

For me, DC is my only true home, but I do have an unhealthy obsession with my car (the codymobile, purchased with help from DC members), which has led to my frequent posting on a forum dedicated to my car model: http://clubsx4.com/forum

How about you folks?

4971

Living Room / ghacks interviews freewaregenius

« Last post by mouser on January 23, 2016, 06:07 AM »

Martin over at ghacks.net has a sweet interview with Samer, who runs/ran freewaregenius.com -- two great freeware sites that have always been supportive of DonationCoder:

http://www.ghacks.ne...waregenius-interview

4972

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 23, 2016, 05:07 AM »

currently it's python code using opencv machine vision library, both known to run well on raspberry pi.
pure cross-platform commandline tool, no gui.

i will eventually have to write c-for-python-module versions of a few of my key python routines in order to get them running fast enough to be suitable for a raspberry pi.

some unknowns:
issues regarding using a cheap raspberry pi camera.
coding eventual GUI interface using touchscreen raspberry pi touchscreen.

4973

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 22, 2016, 09:02 PM »

now that is cool.

4974

Developer's Corner / Re: Dice analyzer machine project

« Last post by mouser on January 22, 2016, 07:44 PM »

Multiple sides being the same is not a problem, as long as you tell the system ahead of time how many UNIQUE sides there are.
If you tell it there are 6 unique sides but really there are only 2, the system will find a way to group the images into 6 unique sides (e.g. differentiating two otherwise identical sides based on a small piece of dirt or minor discoloration).

4975

UrlSnooper / Re: Broken link on URLSnooper homepage

« Last post by mouser on January 22, 2016, 06:19 PM »

thx, will fix.