Devlog #12 : scrapped my CV code, went full YOLO

ok!! so i went on a learning spree today and a LOT happened. ngl one of those days where you start the morning thinking you know stuff and end it realizing you knew nothing.

##i was doing my CV wrong

so my old fire detection was classical CV, just color matching + flicker. cool little hack and it technically worked, but tbh it was way too fragile. anything orange in bright light could set it off, and it’s is supposed to fly on a drone in the sun, so that’s not happening.

so i did the painful thing and scrapped the whole lot. felt bad deleting code that “worked” but it was never gonna be reliable enough out in the real world.

went down the YOLO rabbit hole

spent basically the whole day researching YOLO (you only look once, the object detection one). instead of me hand coding what fire “looks like” with color rules, the model actually learns it from examples. way more robust to lighting, angles, all the randome stuff a drone is gonna run into.

got a basic YOLO model up and running. its rough rn but its already a different league from the color matching.

side quest: mediapipe body tracking

also messed around with mediapipe today as a practice project, tracked my own body/pose in real time. wasnt strictly for the drone, just wanted to get comfortable with actual CV pipelines and see how the landmark tracking works under the hood.

hardware: turned my ceiling into a drone

im on vacation so no real flying, but i still wanted to test from a drone’s POV. so i straight up taped a webcam to my ceiling pointing straight down. now i can test the CV from that top down birds eye angle, which is way closer to what the drone actually sees than my laptop cam pointed at my face.

next up

• train the YOLO model on a proper fire dataset
• run it against the ceiling cam footage
• check fps on my laptop vs what i’ll realistically get on the Pi

🫡