OCR from App Inventor 2?

[Vincent Cate]

I have Googled and see that the question of OCR from App Inventor has come up before.  I see that calling an online service can work but would much rather be able to use ActivityStarter to call another app on my phone.   Has anyone gotten that to work?  

I am working on a solar autonomous robot boat that can go out in the ocean (www.islandboys.ai).    I have a cigarette lighter size voltage sensor that displays the reading on LEDs.   So if I could use OCR with the camera I should be able to see how charged the battery is.   This is useful information on a solar/electric boat.   While my boat has not yet been out of cell tower range, I hope to be able to get there at some point.    So I rather not use an online service.  

An alternative is a bluetooth voltage sensor but the only reasonable priced one I could find is no longer in production.

I have finally installed Android Studio and played with a few sample openCV apps.   I am working on a second boat (got crowed funding of $795 so far!) and want one boat to be able to drive up to the other and connect with magnets.  So need some computer vision.  I will end up doing my own Java app for the things I can not do from App Inventor and calling it from our App Inventor code.  I have not done Java for around 15 years but it is starting to come back to me.  But this may take a few weeks and it would be fun to be able to tell the voltage in the mean time.  

For a few weeks I guess even calling an online service for OCR is fine.   Acually, sending an image back and just looking at the image so we knew the boat was ok would probably be fine for a few weeks.  

So has anyone worked out a good online OCR service to call from App Inventor or worked out an OCR app to call with ActivityStarter?

Thanks.

  -- Vince

[Taifun]

see this thread https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mitappinventortest/C1NDDuCedbw/oWK4nT1Ry84J

Taifun

[Vincent Cate]

 I am hoping someone worked out something faster and free but that may be the best known method.

Thanks,

   -- Vince

[Taifun]

you could be the one, who works something out faster and free

looking forward to your contribution...

Taifun

[Vincent Cate]

I don't want to write code when I can copy someone else's but if I have to write it I will.   So it seems that ActivityStarter and Intents will let me send text strings back and forth and that is fine for what I need to do.   Can you recommend an example/sample that includes code for both the App Inventor 2 side and the Java side?  I want the Java code to keep running like a server. 

I have a number of things I need to use Java for so I will make one Java app that does all of these and works well with App Inventor.   The list so far is:

1) Get battery charge level and temperature
2) Use camera without any operator help (both front and back, and different resolutions, save to file)
3) OCR (will just specify color range for letters, return text)
4) Computer vision (where is the Red blob, which way to yellow ball, return X,Y and number of pixels)

I will do the Java app in a general way so other people could use it too.   For example the color parameters will be passed in from App Inventor.   The #1 seems easy and the other 3 can be mostly openCV and a bit of OCR.   So it is not a crazy amount of work.  Will be fun.

[Vincent Cate]

Are there other things that people want to be able to do from App Inventor that are not too hard in Java and would be reasonable to add to my todo list?