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.