Dragon Detector

An electronics project to build a device that detects dragons and alerts the knights to spring into action.

The project was entered in the Qualcomm Maker Month Contest 2016 and was featured on their Developer of the Month blog.
The detector is activated by a passive infrared detector which activates the webcam to take a picture. The webcam image is passed to a computer vision library called OpenCV which determines if a Dragon has been detected. The defences in the form of lights and motion are activated and the operator is notified using the IFTTT maker API. The brain of the device is the DragonBoard410C running a Linux operating system, the control code is written in Python with libraries for the GPIO access.

Code for the project is on GitHub
Details of the electronics can be found at Element14
The mechanical aspects and enhancements are detailed here.

Knight v2 Completion

Knight v2 Completion

The knight project was completed just in time for the October Linuxing in London meetup. Mechanics The 3D model was completed and painted a week or so back. I filled a spare hole in the box lid with a dowel

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More Knight Painting

More Knight Painting

Knight This week the knight was painted with some metallic paint, this looked a bit watery for the first coat but the second coat came up great. and the shield was painted red and white. The shield was painted red

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Painting the Knight

Painting the Knight

Earlier in the year, I printed out a new 3D knight model for my Dragon Detector in white ABS. I’ve been looking at different ways of getting this painted and was considering some metallic spray paints. I concluded those were

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3D Printing a knight

3D Printing a knight

Over the weekend, I printed out the parts for the servo activated knight. It is designed to be glue together but I’ve made the parts a sliding fit. See GitHub for the models. 3D printing the parts There were a

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A knight to scare dragons

A knight to scare dragons

Although the Dragon Detector project video has been submitted, I wanted incorporate some of my original ideas which got cut due to time constraints. Rob Ives’ Knight model is excellent but I’d always intended to build an moving 3D model

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Boxing the Dragon

Boxing the Dragon

The last part of the Dragon Detector project was to put it all together and box it up. I had planned to make a 3D printed figure with a servo operated arm, however I knew that would take time so

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Dragon Detection Project Update

Dragon Detection Project Update

As previously mentioned the Dragonboard project is mostly getting documented over at Element14 as it’s about electronic and coding. The source code can be found on github. So far I’ve got the GPIO (general purpose inputs and outputs) working, lighting

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Dragon Detector Progress

Dragon Detector Progress

For the Dragon Detector project I’ve been looking at my pre-requisites for making the project work. Internet connectivity Webcam Python OpenCV GPIO I’ve managed to get all of these installed and working. As the articles are quite technical and software

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