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Even if keeping bees sounds about as wise to you as keeping velociraptors (we all know how that movie went), we have to acknowledge that they are a worthwhile thing to have around. We don’t personally want them around us of course, but we respect those who are willing to keep a hive on their property for the good of the environment. But as it turns out, there are more challenges to keeping bees than not getting stung: you’ve got to keep track of the things too.
After some training, a Raspberry Pi with a camera can count how many bees are in a given image to within a few percent of the actual number. Getting an accurate count of his bees allows [Mat] to generate fascinating visualizations about his hive’s activity and health. With real-world threats such as colony collapse disorder, this type of hard data can be crucial.
This is a perfect example of a hack which might not pertain to many of us as-is, but still contains a wealth of information which could be applicable to other projects. [Mat] goes into a fantastic amount of detail about the different approaches he tried, what worked, what didn’t, and where he goes from here. So far the only problem he’s having is with the Raspberry Pi: it’s only able to run at one frame per second due to the computational requirements of identifying the bees. But he’s got some ideas to improve the situation.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Friday June 01 2018, @05:46PM (2 children)
Obviously you've never done much software development. I'd venture a guess that the majority of software in the world is a "get-it-done" hack, rather than being a well-engineered solution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 01 2018, @06:42PM (1 child)
30 years professional embedded development, ten years before that hobbying. 25 years safety critical nuclear and space applications. Looks like a significant amount of engineering went into building this system, even if it was not done by Mat Kelcey. Thirty years ago we would have had to build each part individually, not the chips, but layout a board, design a power supply, some sort of video interface, write the software, operating system. Most of this is now done and you can connect parts like legos. Still does not mean it's a hack which is usually considered an ugly quick fix rather than a clean design.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 02 2018, @01:03PM
Oh, I don't deny that lots of good development is done. But how many projects have you browsed the code for? Heck, how many of the libraries you use have you browsed the code for?