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Junk laptop arrives

A project log for Auto tracking camera

A camera that tracks a person & counts reps using *AI*.

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 06/08/2019 at 21:180 Comments

After living with a macbook that only did 3fps & a desktop which ran the neural network over a network, the lion kingdom obtained a gaming laptop with GT970 that fell off a truck.  The GT970 was much more powerful than the macbook's GT750 & the desktop's GT1050, while the rest was far behind.  Of course, the rest was a quad 2.6Ghz I7 with 12GB RAM.  To an old timer, it's an astounding amount of power.  Just not comparable to the last 5 years.

 Most surprising was how the GT970 had 50% more memory & 2x more cores than the GT1050 but lower clockspeeds.  They traded clockspeed for parallelism to make it portable, implying clockspeed used more power than transistor count.

Pose tracking on a tablet using cloud computing was a failure.  The network was never reliable enough.  It desperately needed a laptop with more horsepower than the macbook.

The instructions on https://hackaday.io/project/162944-auto-tracking-camera/log/157763-making-it-portable were still relevant.  After 2 days of compiling openpose from scratch with the latest libraries, porting countreps to a standalone Linux version, the junk laptop ran it at 6.5fps with the full neuron count, 1280x720 webcam, no more dropped frames.  It was a lot better at counting than the tablet.


The mane problem was it quickly overheated.  After some experimentation, 2 small igloo bars directly under the fans were enough to keep it cool.  Even better would be a sheet of paper outlining where to put the igloo bars & laptop.  Igloo bars may actually be a viable way to use the power of a refrigerator to cool CPUs.

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