In this follow on from my last PowerWire article on ActiveMQ, we will be using a Raspberry Pi, with Machine Learning, to take photos of birds feeding in our garden. This part of the series will focus on the ML segment to take a photograph and let machine learning decide what is in it. After that, in my next article, we will send the information over to the IBM i for notification purposes. For ease, and time constraints, we will be using Node-RED to take a picture, then pass that image through to a Machine Learning module to interrogate the photo and decide if there are any birds in there and not the squirrels after their share of the nuts! Node-RED, which also runs on many platforms, including the IBM i, is very easy to use for this type of project.

A few months ago, I started entertaining the idea of giving my car the ability to detect and recognize objects. I mostly fancied this idea because I've seen what Teslas are capable of, and while I didn't want to buy a Tesla right away (Model 3 is looking juicier with each passing day I gotta say), I thought I'd try meeting my dream halfway. Below, I've documented each step in the project. If you just want to see a video of the detector in action/the GitHub link, skip to the bottom. I started by thinking of what such a system should be capable of.