Can I get an Arduino device to work with OCR software and a camera? There is some good free or cheap OCR software, I think one such product called Tesseract, and I'd like to know if it can be made to compile with/for Arduino. And what kind of physical camera should I get, and how would I physically hook it up to an Arduino? I'd be interested in the new Due version for this project due to the higher amount of computation required.
Can I get an Arduino device to work with OCR software
That depends on your definition of "work with" and which OCR software.
and a camera?
Sure. As long as you limit yourself to telling the camera to take a picture.
I think one such product called Tesseract
Google should confirm or deny that in less than a second.
I'd like to know if it can be made to compile with/for Arduino.
Provide a link, to be sure, but I'd suspect no.
what kind of physical camera should I get
For what?
how would I physically hook it up to an Arduino?
I'm partial to duct tape myself.
I'd be interested in the new Due version for this project due to the higher amount of computation required.
Higher than what?
If you're considering having the OCR done by the Arduino, I suspect that's not practical. The Arduino has very little RAM and not much processing power, and OCR typically involves receiving and manipulating far more data than the Arduino can hold in RAM. Of course just about anything is possible if you throw enough effort and ingenuity at it, but to my mind the Arduino is not a sensible platform for doing OCR. You really need a microprocessor for that sort of thing, not just a microcontroller.
Thanks PeterH, I thought 512 MB RAM would be enough RAM in the Due. Maybe not. BTW, that PaulS guy made me laugh for hours with all his rhetorical responses. He's an uproariously funny guy. Duct tape! Okay, perhaps my questions were partly vague, but I'm a noob at Arduino, and I think even we noobs deserve respect. You gave me lots of respect PeterH, thanks kindly.
I thought 512 MB RAM would be enough RAM in the Due.
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDue
96 KBytes of SRAM.
512 KBytes of Flash memory for code.
As the Due is just out this week no one has had the time to develop a camera interface yet so it is early days.
However OCR from a camera is a bit tricky because of the resolution you need. Even the Due's 96K of memory is going to struggle to read a page of text.