Auto Scale Logger
The Project
AutoScale Logger is a data collection tool designed to make professional hardware testing affordable for student engineers and independent makers. What it is: The software automates the process of reading and logging measurement data directly from video clips of digital scales during structural and motor torque tests. Inspiration: Professional automated testing equipment is extremely expensive. I wanted to build a accessible alternative that uses a standard digital scale, a video camera, and code to completely eliminate slow, error-prone manual data entry. What was difficult: The biggest obstacle was overcoming screen glare, motion blur, and ambient lighting variations on the scale's LCD display. I spent dozens of hours refining an image processing pipeline in OpenCV to clear up the video frames. After discovering that local libraries like EasyOCR and Tesseract maxed out around 60% accuracy, I successfully pivoted to the Google Cloud Vision API, which pushed my data logging success rate over 95%.
