Machine Play: Again

I updated my system for sending SMS notifications when my deck furniture’s covers get blown off in the wind. My original post talked about version one of the system. I’ve since made a handful of refinements to simplify things.

• I ditched the Amcrest camera in favor of a Foscam. The Amcrest guys broke HTTP-Basic auth with a firmware update awhile ago, and the new auth setup doesn’t work. So, Amcrest essentially broke HTTP access to image snapshots. Foscam isn’t much better, and in some ways is much worse (auth creds passed directly in the URL), but they at least support HTTP image snapshots, and I, partially, solved the massive security issue by locking down all network i/o to my private LAN. The state of IPC cameras is abysmal; when did outdoor webcams get so bad?!?!
• I removed the cloud server from the system entirely after I was able to get all of the correct packages/SDKs installed on my local Raspberry Pi; now everything lives local. With everything local, I was able to remove the annoying FTP server.
• I rebuilt the data model on an order of magnitude greater number of sample images. And, in terms of image labeling, I went to two labels instead of the previous five to try and describe the various non-covered states. Evaluation/prediction is much better now.
• I checked w/ the CloudFactory folks for image labeling, and they’re setup for massive scale (millions+) image labeling; my job was too small for them.

I also came across https://www.boulderai.com/ which is doing some cool commercial grade outdoor imagery work.