

Student reveals the origins of his real-life Portal turret - marcieoum
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/12/real-life-portal-turret/#s:pic1-2

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jff
It's a very nice hardware design, but it's certainly nothing groundbreaking--
some of my classmates did the same thing for their senior project, having a
nerf turret shoot at any moving object of a certain color (I believe they used
a toy schoolbus, which in retrospect seems a slightly odd choice).

Still, it's a very spiffy design!

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zoop
Since it seems like they are having a computer do the image analysis,
background subtraction on the image processing end of things seems like it
would yield much better results. Since a turret can only point at one place
anyways, they don't necessarily need to pick out a single entity, so aiming at
the place of last movement would aim at anything without the need of a red
shirt.

~~~
icebraining
Yeah, it's what the guy in Militarizing Your Backyard with Python[1][2] did,
using OpenCV, and that could target squirrels in a natural environment.

[1]: [http://pyvideo.org/video/674/militarizing-your-backyard-
with...](http://pyvideo.org/video/674/militarizing-your-backyard-with-python-
computer)

[2]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3710107>

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robert00700
Great project, although it might have been a good idea for them to check out
using the Microsoft Kinect and Point Cloud Library (It's like OpenCV for depth
cameras! <http://pointclouds.org/>). With the 3D data you could account for
the trajectory of the missiles, for example.

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alasano
Cue 'I will give my firstborn child' posts. This looks like a really fun
project to work on. You have various ways of perfecting it and you know people
on the internet are drooling over it.

~~~
blhack
I bet you could build a really rough version of this in a week :). A polished
version in a month.

The lag is pretty bad -- so no worries about any very high end CV stuff. I
haven't used it, but look at OpenCV.

I actually built the image analysis bits for something that could do this a
few years ago using [naively] Puthon Image Library. I was using it to take
pictures of my dog while I was at work, but pointing something at her wOuldnt
be a problem.

In fact, you could build a very simLe sentry turret like this using a couPle
of servos and an arduino.

This is a cool project, but never feel like it's out of your reach :)

~~~
alasano
I'm not the person saying that I will give my firstborn child :P. I wouldn't
feel as if it's out of reach should I desire to do it though. I'm not overly
critical on prototypes!

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EvanYou
I'd suggest using openFrameworks (openframeworks.cc) with which you can easily
hook up a Microsoft Kinect and control the Arduino via serial.

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abcd_f
Lag is pretty bad :P

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dz13
This is amazing! Wonder how hard it was to make?

