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0 pointsyellowapple6y ago0 comments

I'd imagine the processing power required to detect whether or not a video feed contains a cat doesn't jive well with sharing a CPU with something presumably-realtime-sensitive like driving a motor to open a door.

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jonaswi6y ago· 3 in thread

You are exactly right. Before I "optimised" the image recognition the whole detection part was running on a Mac Mini. I also like to "separate concerns". The Pi that is handling the door opening runs Alpine with a read-only file system so whenever there is a power outage or whatever it boots into a known good state. The image processing part is behind a big UPS and is running with a writable file system.

nicoburns6y ago

Seems like the door opening Pi would be a good candidate for an esp8266 or an esp32 (if you were looking to save costs and/or have fun playing with a more limited environment)

esp8266 means wifi, and also means you don't have the whole linux TLS ecosystem to play with. I'd be somewhat cautious about using an esp8266 (as much as I like them) to unlock my front door...

Thanks for the tips! I will order a esp8266 and check it out.

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