Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am beginning a new project I hopefully won’t burn out on. Let’s get started!
Twenty years ago, my father was tasked with scanning and distributing the contents of an old sea chest that used to belong to his father. Fast forward to the present day, and the project hasn’t even started. I’ve been building my skills the last couple years, and I think I can do one or two better than was originally planned.
Timeline: I’m burned out after three intense weeks on my last project. I’m two weeks ahead, and I plan on keeping that lead for now. After two weeks of this project, I want to go back and try getting the official Java on Micro Core. With any luck, this post will come out when that’s already happened.
I’ve been planning this project for a while now. Nothing to make a whole post about, but important nonetheless.
My intended finished product is as follows: Family members will be able to go to an IP address in a browser, search by a system of tags, and navigate to a specific scan’s page. Groups of pages will make scans of books easier to find, and comments on each picture will only make identifying people in each picture easier.
During my initial investigations, an acquaintance recommended Philomena, a Booru-style image board that fits the description almost perfectly. Their code is free and open source, and the license is compatible with what I want to do.
On the hardware side of things, I have a few prototypes milestones planned out.
The first milestone will be declared when I can manually upload an image and view it on the site from a separate connection. I am planning on prototyping on Blinkie, though almost any computer should do.
The second hardware milestone will be when I have the pictures stored on a RAID array for redundancy. During a visit to Third Workshop, I heard that these can be tricky to do myself, and there are cheap, reliable, preassembled units I can use.
The third hardware milestone will move the software off Blinkie and onto a new machine I want to build myself. I want to remove the innards of whatever RAID setup I end up getting and arrange them into a custom case with a different Raspberry Pi serving as the motherboard.
The main event of the project is actually scanning pictures for safe storage. I know for a fact that disorganized files are discouraging to sift through, so I want to write a script to handle scanning and uploading files. It will have functionality to define groups of pictures as they are scanned, as well as handle bulk tagging.
Skills I expect to learn in the near future: composite 3D printing with ABS, a new programming language, and a better understanding of Git and any other software I need to get Philomena running effectively. As of writing, I have already started work on next week’s post, so I may be cheating a little on that last detail.
Final Question: Do you have any decades old projects that just never seem to get any attention?