Hi, I am working on an graduation project and we are trying to get the arduino to read a code (for example: X193). It will always be one letter followed by three numbers, in completely random order and it is using all the letters of the alphabet.
I was wondering if anyone could help me getting started on this. Can I do this by using a webcam or do I need something else? I would like for the Arduino to read to code and eventually send it to Processing to start a sketch. Hope you can help me!
we are trying to get the arduino to read a code
Where do you want to read the code from? You mention a webcam - the Arduino won't have enough power to process an image and perform OCR on it.
Please describe in more detail what you are trying to accomplish.
The code will be on a small piece of paper and in our interactive installation the user eventually get his/ her personal code on a ball on a screen (using Processing).
What we would like to do is when a user holds his code under a webcam (or something else that is able to read something like that) that code is read and we can send to the processing sketch. So we would like to get the letter and the three numbers to use in the Processing sketch.
What would you suggest using?
A webcam connected to a PC and use a service like OCR space to process the image and return back the text. It works quite well on machine printed text (i.e. not handwriting). You will need to do this using your favourite PC programming environment.
Once you have the text, you can send it to the Arduino over the serial port to kick off whatever the "processing" is that you want to do on the Arduino.
You can do the image capture and send to OCR space using HTML 5 in the browser, but you can't open the serial port from within the browser so you would still need another program on the PC to deal with that.
OCR is not really an application for a small microcontroller, it needs some decent CPU or GPU grunt.
Printed characters of a fixed size and font are much more reliably interpreted than random handwriting,
note.
Once you have the text, you can send it to the Arduino over the serial port to kick off whatever the "processing" is that you want to do on the Arduino.
Processing is a language perhaps not the best name but their you are.
There is no part of this project you can do on an Arduino, it is all computer based.