Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2020

Using FCM with the new HTTP v1 API and NodeJS

When trying to send FCM notifications I found out that Google has changed their API specifications. The legacy API still works but if you want to use the latest v1 API you need to make several changes. The list of changes is listed on their site so I won't be repeating them again but I'll just mention some of the things that caused some trial and error on my project. The official guide from Google is here : Official Migration Guide to v1 . The request must have a Body with the JSON containing the message data. Most importantly it needs to have "message" field which must contain the target of the notification. Usually this is a Topic, or Device IDs. Since my previous project was using GAS, my request had a field called "payload" instead of "body". Using the request from my previous project, my request in Node JS was as follows: request ({ url: 'https://fcm.googleapis.com/v1/projects/safe-door-278108/messages:send' , method: ...

Scan doodles and watch them come alive!

In this post I'd like to share about one of my projects involving doodles and bringing them to live with Unity. We prepare doodle papers and some crayons and let children color them. After they're done, we scan the images and they appear on the screen. The screen is projected on walls using projectors. Doodles come alive on the screen Project flow I utilized document scanners readily available such as the following. A document scanner The scanner has many helpful features, such as cropping and rotating the scanned images so they are nice and straight even if the paper is slightly rotated or not aligned properly. The scanned images are stored in a server and a Unity application polls the server for new images every few seconds. For the server I initially used AWS S3 for image storage and later on we switched to a local image server with Node JS. Attaching 2D Texture to a 3D Model I no longer have access to the actual doodle papers but they look l...

Object detection with Google Colab and Tensorflow

This is just a memo of the challenges I faced when running a model training on Google Colab, while following a great tutorial here . Mind the versions Tensorflow is currently at version 2.2.0 but most tutorials are still using the contrib package, and there is no known easy way to update the code to remove dependency on contrib. So my best bet is to downgrade the tensorflow version to 1.x. Since Google Colab only gives the options of either 1.x or 2.x and we cannot specify the exact version, I ended up with version 1.15.2. Even with the command :  %tensorflow_version  1.15.0 I ended up with : 1.15.2 Another pitfall was the version of numpy. Installing numpy gives us the version 1.18.3 but for some reason this generates the error : TypeError: 'numpy.float64' object cannot be interpreted as an integer Downgrading numpy to version 1.17.4 solved this for me. It seems we don't need ngrok for tensorboard With the command :  %load_ext tensorboard W...

OpenCV native plugin for Unity in IOS

In one of my recent projects, I needed to use OpenCV from within Unity, in IOS. The asset called OpenCVForUnity is overkill because I didn't need the whole OpenCV library, just a few functions. In addition, this asset does not implement the whole OpenCV library so unless you know that what you need is included you may find it lacking when you discover it does not support some functions you need. As my project involves some trial and error and mixing algorithms together I decided to go with a native plugin. Overview In IOS, a native library is built as a bundle . We need to put this bundle inside Unity's Plugins/OSX folder to use it. Therefore, we need to create two projects. An XCode project to build the native plugin. A Unity project to use the plugin. Dependencies Of course, since we need to use OpenCV we will have to install it first. Tutorials on installing OpenCV on IOS are abundant and I will not include them here. Assuming you have installed OpenCV go to t...