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Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

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Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#31

Post by ReverseCold »

pavlov wrote: post #29
epberry wrote: post #24

Very cool. I shudder to think of the GPU costs to run these models though. Perhaps they're using TPUs to be as efficient as possible. If you imagine a room occupied in the evening by people for several hours and you have any decent framerate, you're running your pose estimation network on each frame for several hours. And these models are big as far as I have seen. So that pretty much means you have one cloud GPU per…

I think you're overestimating the processing requirements. The original 2010 Kinect did fundamentally similar processing (multi-person tracking and skeletal mapping) on the Xbox 360 which had a PowerPC CPU from 2005.

Running neural networks is usually much easier than training them (computationally).

Was the Kinect even a neural network? I don't think it was.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#32

Post by neilraina »

warent wrote: post #12

Super cool idea, although the privacy implications are a little bit discomforting. Anyway, I'd be interested to know how you're dealing with the depth problem. For example, if there's a light behind you and a light above you, pointing up looks like you could be pointing at either light.

This is one of the most challenging parts of this problem. We’re in the middle of transitioning to a 3D model that will be able to tell the difference really well.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#33

Post by maxerickson »

neilraina wrote: post #27
brwsr wrote: post #15

Definitely cool technology, only not for me. I'll never place a camera in my home that is connected to some cloud service or company database. That data is simply too valuable for me to send out to a "trusted" party.

That's a fair concern. We are very serious about privacy. Existing cameras today focus on security so they have to store your data. Piccolo on the other hand is for real-time interactions so images are never stored.

What do you plan to do with other sorts of data?

Like does the cloud just trigger events and this it, or does it keep a log of where people are located in the scene and whether they have their arms crossed, etc?

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#35

Post by _rpd »

hashkb wrote: post #10

> but the more complicated models are run in the cloud This is a massive problem with home automation tools today. I need to rely on Comcast to stay alive to be able to turn lights on and off in my house? To me, it's an absolute dealbreaker. I've spent more time than I feel like I should have had to in order to control devices I own without any data leaving my LAN. Am I the only one who feels like it's a totally absu…

I think it's okay as long as it fails to a usable state when the internet connection is interrupted.

To me, the bigger worry is having cloud connected video cameras (or microphones) in my home at all. Obviously many people are happy to trade privacy for convenience, but this this is a red line for me. There are too many ways for it to get deeply dystopic really quickly.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#38

Post by hashkb »

marlonmisra wrote: post #23
hashkb wrote: post #10

> but the more complicated models are run in the cloud This is a massive problem with home automation tools today. I need to rely on Comcast to stay alive to be able to turn lights on and off in my house? To me, it's an absolute dealbreaker. I've spent more time than I feel like I should have had to in order to control devices I own without any data leaving my LAN. Am I the only one who feels like it's a totally absu…

Our first prototype ran locally end-to-end. To make that work we used a Jetson TX2 ($600 computer), but the performance was abysmal. In a few years, it might be possible to do what we're doing locally and at a reasonable price.

I just think it's unfortunate that every player in the space has to ship their own hardware (and, obviously, force the user into a walled garden so that competitor's products are inconvenient to use.)

Give me (a power user) something I can run in a docker container locally, or on any of my local Macs or PCs.

Or, assume as a constraint that smart homes need to be able to run themselves. I would appreciate if everyone in the space made an effort at detente while the technology matured to a point where a massive privacy and security hole wasn't required in order to have the thing work at all.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#39

Post by frakkingcylons »

Wow, that short clip on your homepage is crazy effective. I understood it immediately. Super cool product. I would buy this in a heartbeat if it came in a self-contained hardware package that included the camera and a module that does the CV processing in a way such that no video of my home touches a 3rd-party server.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#40

Post by hashkb »

astone wrote: post #18
hashkb wrote: post #10

> but the more complicated models are run in the cloud This is a massive problem with home automation tools today. I need to rely on Comcast to stay alive to be able to turn lights on and off in my house? To me, it's an absolute dealbreaker. I've spent more time than I feel like I should have had to in order to control devices I own without any data leaving my LAN. Am I the only one who feels like it's a totally absu…

I was looking for this. Cloud dependencies are a dealbreaker for me when it comes to home automation. I guess the alternative is to have hardware capable of doing the cloud work on your internal network.

I have a refurbished HP tower ("only" 2 GHz and 16GB ram) running Home Assistant, an MQTT bridge for my SmartThings hub (so I can use it as a dumb z-wave radio), Plex, and whatever else I feel like using it for.

It cost $300 I think. That's about the same price as the Google WiFi 3-pack. /shrug

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