As you might recall from my last blog post, I’ve been playing with workshop organization using fiducial markers to locate storage boxes. I’ve started to move past the proof of concept code phase into the slightly functional open-source project phase, and I created a repository and developed some working code. The project is just barely functional at this phase, but it has the ability to connect to cameras over RTSP, skip images to reduce the detection framerate, decode them using one of the AprilTag types, and publish the resulting detection data to MQTT. Conceptually, this is all that’s required if you just want to get a bunch of tag ID and coordinate data from camera(s) into MQTT to deal with yourself.

I’m not a great frontend developer (I have basically no experience beyond HTML), so some assistance in that portion of the project would be great. I’m slowly churning through the backend (REST APIs, database code, …) but the UI is nonexistant. My goal is to eventually be able to view a list of each box in the system, sort by name / category / shelf, and find its location (or lack of known location).

Until then, feel free to follow my progress on both the Project Page as well as the Repository.

Also, if you’re interested in contributing but aren’t a programmer, I’m open to suggestions to new names, a graphical theme, and logo for the project as well.