LEGO Pick a Brick Wall Exchange Group on Facebook
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s BrickBuildr’s role in the future, and one of the things I come back to is Pick a Brick wall information… how the information is communicated, the best way to represent that information on a web-site, and are there faster/quicker ways to share that data without a lot of “data entry”, especially since that information changes so fast. And I’ve hit on a few ideas, but I must admit, may not be the best person to help make that jump…
As a starting point, I’ve joined LEGO Pick a Brick Wall Exchange Group on Facebook. Over the past few months, I’ve been sourcing pictures to figure out when I should make trips to the nearest LEGO store… I’ll see people talking about new parts hitting the wall, and sure enough a few days later, they show up locally (or they’re already sold out of the part)… From this, I realize, images is still the fastest form of communication.
I’ve also watched a video recently where machine learning (ML) was used to determine when it was time to restock inventory… the full details I can’t go into right now, but it was fascinating how thousands of pictures were taken to build a ML model that would train a machine to identify the part/color, no matter the orientation, and from that determine the parts density on a location to determine if more of that part/color needed to be added…
Simple enough idea; now the practical application… Each one of us cary around a smart phone when we shop. What if instead, we took a picture of the part, send the image to a ML processor, that would identify the part/color, send back that information to the device, from there, the user could verify that part/image was correct (or the information could be a best guess) and then that person could assign a PaB wall location? Facial recognition for LEGO bricks.
…If this is the direction, I really need to work on an API for the web-site. Do research into image processing and object detection… Find cheaper alternatives to AWS… but at the same time, Google/Amazon do have a ML platform… but this site doesn’t make any money… hmm…