This Raspberry Pi Project Helps You Cheat at Scrabble

(Image credit: Wayne, Devscover Coding & Raspberry Pi)

If you can't seem to find the right words, this Raspberry Pi project is for you. After losing too many Scrabble games to his girlfriend, Wayne from the Devscover Coding & Raspberry Pi YouTube channel decided a Raspberry Pi would be a more worthy competitor. 

In a video posted to YouTube today, the maker showed how we crafted his Pi-powered wordsmith. The project uses the new Raspberry Pi HQ Camera to take a picture of the Scrabble tiles in your hand. That image is processed and converted into text, which is then passed along to a Python script. Using the text, the script finds a list of the highest-possible scoring words which is then displayed onto a screen. Wayne used a Raspberry Pi Touch Display

In the video, Wayne used a Raspberry Pi 3 B. However, this project isn't very resource-intensive and would work with older models—as long as the board has a display and camera port. The project requires a camera and some sort of display screen for visual output.

If you want to explore the code used in this project, you're in luck. Wayne was nice enough to share all of his code on Github. It relies on Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine for character recognition. This platform was originally developed by HP in the mid-’80s, but Google has maintained it since 2006.

Be sure to check out the YouTube channel Devscover Coding & Raspberry Pi for any updates on Wayne's Scrabble career and more cool Pi projects like this one.

Ash Hill
Freelance News and Features Writer

Ash Hill is a Freelance News and Features Writer with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.

  • NightHawkRMX
    The raspberry pi is quite versatile.
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    Not going to be much help to cheat as it does not take into account the tiles that have been played on the board. However a small change to how scoring is done it would be useful for cheating the letters round on countdown :)
    Reply
  • chemistu
    My PI project helped me cheat at scrabble too.

    I duct-taped one to a dictionary..
    Reply