I'm working on a project that requires optical character recognition (OCR) and my team wants to use Google's open-source OCR called Tesseract. The program works fine in the Terminal when you provide it with the image's file path, but we need to implement the output text file in our Arduino program somehow.
I understand that the Arduino Uno doesn't have enough RAM and processing power to run OCR, let alone with the other tasks we need it to do, so we are trying to have the Arduino and laptop/Raspberry Pi work together.
The camera on the Arduino would take a picture, send it to Tesseract on the laptop or Pi where the text will be extracted, and the output text file will be sent back to the Arduino to convert the text to braille letters. The braille letters will be displayed to the user using micro stepper motors to raise the correct braille pins.
How can this type of back and forth communication between the micro controller and the computer be done? This is my first Arduino project so sorry if I'm asking about a really simple topic.
Can be done like that but it also makes the Arduino pretty much redundant.
Thanks for the quick reply.
The project is really just to build a prototype and not a completely self functioning device, so I'm thinking that the Arduino and laptop set-up will be simpler than the laptop, Pi, and Arduino. Since the Pi lacks the peripherals of a regular computer, it'll have to be connected to a laptop anyway, which might give the audience (during the demo) the perception that the whole project is bulkier and more complicated than it really is.
So, if I make the OCR run on the laptop and just send the text file to the Arduino, the Pi isn't necessary at all, right? If the project required a final product vs. a prototype then of course, I'd want to ditch the need for a laptop completely. But, given the timeline and budget for the project, does using the laptop and Arduino together sound like a solid plan?
Unless you can install the program for the Pi on the SD card and run it without having to use the Raspbian OS, in which case you wouldn't even need the laptop.
Why not go for just the Pi?