I am at near 30 years in tech and let me told you one of the first commercial customer I had about 25 years ago.
This customer had a factory where it sorted potatoes. They had a huge weight scale where they would weight truck coming in, full and then going out, empty. The difference was the weight of the potatoes.
The problem was that scale was mechanical and calibrated by officials, which means nobody was allowed to tinker with it. You could read the weight on a big VFD 7segment display, that was it.
They wanted to automate the reading of the weight. Everybody told them it was impossible because of the calibration. But I had an idea. I took a webcam (which could only take photo at the time, no video, I think it was photo man or something, serial based) and I put a colored filter in front of it which would only let red pass and did OCR on the result. It worked for 6years before they got a digital scale.
I've been doing this kind of weird thing my whole life. I find solutions.
Now I have more and more grey hair in my beard and I start to feel a bit "out of the loop" with all those new things (docker, kubernethingy, JS zillion of packages...).
I am a bit scare, I fear the moment where I will just be a relic.
There's a great quote by a character in last week's episode of "For all Mankind" that pretty much summarizes my career in a nutshell. No matter my age I plan on living my life by it.
> “These are engineering problems, and we are engineers. Shall we begin?”
As someone who works in machine vision and a sister division of my company likely made the scale you are referring to, I am both impressed and saddened by your story.
The world is so small! I tried to find the reference of the scale but it too old. I asked the company and the current system is from mettler and toledo but not sure of the old one.
This customer had a factory where it sorted potatoes. They had a huge weight scale where they would weight truck coming in, full and then going out, empty. The difference was the weight of the potatoes.
The problem was that scale was mechanical and calibrated by officials, which means nobody was allowed to tinker with it. You could read the weight on a big VFD 7segment display, that was it.
They wanted to automate the reading of the weight. Everybody told them it was impossible because of the calibration. But I had an idea. I took a webcam (which could only take photo at the time, no video, I think it was photo man or something, serial based) and I put a colored filter in front of it which would only let red pass and did OCR on the result. It worked for 6years before they got a digital scale.
I've been doing this kind of weird thing my whole life. I find solutions.
Now I have more and more grey hair in my beard and I start to feel a bit "out of the loop" with all those new things (docker, kubernethingy, JS zillion of packages...).
I am a bit scare, I fear the moment where I will just be a relic.