191–200 of 236 posts
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Optimizing 100 hours per year to 20 hours isn't much either.. It's 3 days, for that to break even development costs have to very low. Of course, selling it as a generic app for counting things is a great way to do this.
That part of the article confused me too, I think it's later implied they pay that 100 vs 20 hour cost much more often than once a year.
I think what the CountThings app is doing is great. There are too many industries where tasks are being performed inefficiently due to a lack of applying readily available technology. They had the foresight to develop a product for a very common problem and make a business out of it. I’m a bit surprised that this is making the rounds of HN though. OpenCV and other computer vision libraries have trivialized such count…
LOL you're not getting this done trivially with OpenCV. https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.
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LOL you're not getting this done trivially with OpenCV. https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
Count things isn't trivial, but this specific use case (counting circles) is trivial with opencv. I've done it myself making a robot follow a ball :)
I just didn't expect to see a website like this today, I guess. It needs more polishing, but that's the power of marketing I guess.
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Count things isn't trivial, but this specific use case (counting circles) is trivial with opencv. I've done it myself making a robot follow a ball :)
Agree. Especially if you can control the image quality, background, etc, this can be done with less fancy methods. Heck, they probably don’t even need an image based solution. They could have also used mostly mechanical machines like how coin counters/sorters work, or used a bigger version of their old counting plate method but with detectors in each slot.
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Is this a bad time to remind HN of that famous comment on the founding of dropbox?
Sorry, out of the loop; what comment?
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The picture in the bottom of the article shows that varying sizes of pearls need to be counted at the same time, making using weight very unreliable. Even if only similar size pearls are allowed, small variations multiplied by a large amount of pearls can cause issues, such as distinguishing 100 pearls of 99 grams each from 99 pearls of 100 grams each.
They could use a simple sorting machine that sorts pearls based on size (like how most coin sorting machines work - run all coins over a small hole, the smallest coins fall through, then run have a slightly larger hole after that, and so on). Then they could have a simple optical/laser sensor below each hole to count how many smallest, smaller, small, medium, large, larger, and largest pearls fall through each hole.…
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Value pricing at it's finest. If the customer saves $1000/month per device, they'll happily pay the $100/month. As it still saves them $900. They don't care how complex/simple the ML implementation is.
But is there any barrier to entry though? By the looks of it, none, the next app will charges $5 per month and it could even be generic ('round objects counter')