The Beans Picker Bot 1: Tech-Humor By FEMI
Tags: tutorial, ai, productivity, azure
Published: 2024-05-16 12:58:06

🤩Hey there, bean lovers and techies! Welcome to the first hilarious and somewhat nutritious episode of Tech-Humor by Femi.

Today, we would be having some Beans, Bots, and Belly Laughs! 

I’m Femi. I'm into what I call Techtainment and Technical Poetry. I'm a mod here at dev for [#sre](https://dev.to/t/sre), currently a [Senior Devops Engineer](https://www.linkedin.com/in/olufemi-alabi-030791125/), but my deepest joy is getting people [entertained](https://dev.to/femolacaster/). I took a break here to write my first novel and now that it is done and coming soon, I am back to blogging.

Today, we’re embarking on a culinary-tech adventure to build the ultimate beans picker tool. So, grab your apron and your coding cap because we’re diving into the wonderful, bean-filled world of artificial intelligence!🥁


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/w0a1d6ke8b36mxwi3x8h.png)

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Why on earth do I need a beans picker tool?” Well, let me take you back to the great bean scandal of the COVID palliatives in a great country. [How someone claimed that the beans they got were filled with stone, and who-knows-what-else](https://thepointernewsonline.com/fgs-controversial-rice-palliative/)? Must have been like a horror movie, but with beans. Imagine having a tool that could sift through all that mess and give you the perfect, stone-free, weevil-free beans. That’s what we’re talking about today!

First things first, let’s talk about our ingredients. No, not the beans—though we’ll get to those soon—but the tech ingredients we need to build our tool. Think of it like preparing a gourmet dish. You need the right gadgets and a dash of AI magic.

We’re going to need a camera, kind of like the one you use for your Instagram food pics. This camera will be the eyes of our beans picker tool. You could waste your time by maybe snapping photos of each bean as they pass by on a conveyor belt🤣. Yes, a conveyor belt, just like at the grocery store, but for beans. Or you could just take a picture of the beans as a whole.

Next, we need a computer to process these photos. Think of it as the brain behind the operation, powered by Microsoft’s Azure AI Vision service. This brain is going to analyze the photos and decide which beans make the cut and which ones get tossed. Just like a bean beauty pageant🤣.


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/1ftc16y2u4dntx14oly3.png)

Now, this AI brain comes with a bunch of superpowers. First up, we’ve got Image Analysis. This is where the magic starts. It can detect all the weird stuff in your beans—sand, stone, weevils, you name it. It’s like having a super picky grandma who won’t let anything gross get into her famous bean soup.🍲

We could even go further to extract text from the beans packaging to check expiration dates? It's called Optical Character Recognition.🕵️ But that's a topic for another day.

Now, let’s get serious about our beans. We need to train our AI to recognize what a good bean looks like. Picture this📷: you’re the head judge in a bean sorting competition. You’ve got hundreds, no, thousands of bean photos. Your job? Teach the AI what makes a winner. Size, color, texture—our AI is going to become a bean connoisseur.

Once we’ve trained our AI, it’s time to get hands-on, or should I say, robot-arm-on. This robotic arm will pick up the good beans and toss the bad ones. No more sand, no more weevils, just pristine, ready-to-cook beans.

And speaking of cooking beans, did you know that in my local parlance, “beans go soon done” means hard work will soon pay off? Funny enough, it also implies that cooking beans takes forever. So, if someone says you’re “cooking beans,” they mean you’re taking your sweet time or doing something off-course. But don’t worry, with our AI beans picker tool, your beans will be ready in no time. Hard work paying off indeed!🤣

Now, you might be wondering about the output. What do we get at the end of this bean-sorting saga? Well, imagine a bowl of perfectly picked beans. No sand, no creepy crawlies—just pure, delicious beans ready for your next culinary masterpiece. Whether you’re making chili, bean soup, or just plain old beans, you’ll have the best ingredients at your fingertips.🤣

And for those of you who are a bit on the shorter side, legend has it that eating more beans will make you taller. So, if you didn’t eat enough beans growing up, now’s your chance to catch up. Do yourself a favor and embrace the bean life. Who knows? Maybe our AI tool will help you grow an inch or two.🤣

So, there you have it, folks! The blueprint for building your very own beans picker tool using AI vision solutions. 

We're now diving into the spicy meatballs of our project: image classification and object detection. So grab your favorite snack, maybe some beans on toast, and let’s get this bean feast started!🥘

So, we’ve got our AI brain ready, right? Now, let’s teach it to tell the good beans from the bad. It’s like training a player to spot the sexiest beaut—only that Scarface here is a computer, and of course there is beauty in beans. First up, we have image classification. This is where our AI will look at a whole picture and decide if it’s showing beans or, heaven forbid, a bunch of weevils. 🤣 You see, image classification is like making a smoothie. You throw in all the ingredients, blend them up, and you get one tasty drink—or in our case, one identified image.

But what if we need to get more specific? What if we want to pick out each individual bean from a big pile, like selecting the best strawberries from a basket? That’s where object detection comes in. This nifty trick allows our AI to draw little boxes around each bean and say, “This one’s a keeper, but that one’s a dud.” 

On a more serious note, I think we are building something spectacular here. Most of my food poisonings ever were from beans. Could this be the life saver? Beansy man 💪! Bean laden 😝! So let’s build and give the hospitals some free space.🤣

Now, imagine how sad the weevils and non-bean impostors must feel right now. 😛 “Oh no, our cover is blown! We’ve been living among the beans for so long, and now we’re exposed!” Poor little critters. But hey, we’re all about quality control here, and that means no freeloaders in our bean soup.

So, back to our AI training. For image classification, we start by uploading a bunch of pictures of beans. Some are perfect, some are, well, more suited for the compost heap. Just like it's judgment day, we tag these images—good beans, bad beans, and probably anything in between. 

Once our AI has learned to tell the difference between a premium bean and a wannabean, we could move on to object detection. This is where we teach our AI to spot every single bean in a picture, like a hyper-vigilant grandma who can pick out the tiniest speck of dirt on her kitchen floor. You know how grandmas👵🏿 are—nothing gets past them!

Speaking of grandmas, can you imagine the shock on her face when you tell her you can pick the beans in just 2 seconds? She’ll be like, “What kind of sorcery is this?” Please, don’t let the shock be too much though. Grandma and Grandpa are old. You don’t have to initiate a different stroke for your different folks.🤣

Now, let’s talk about the difference between these two models in relation to our beans picker tool. With image classification, our AI takes a quick glance at the whole picture and gives us a thumbs up or down. It’s fast, efficient, and perfect for when you’re dealing with a big batch of beans and need a quick quality check.👍

But for those times when we need precision—when we’re hand-picking each bean for that perfect chili recipe—we turn to object detection. This model scans the image, identifies each bean, and tells us exactly which ones to keep. It’s like having a laser-guided bean sorter in your kitchen. Imagine the look on your Grandma's face when you tell her your beans are hand-picked by AI. 


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/7u8i2qb2ul1c6wwhoj1p.png)

So there you have it, folks! Whether we’re blending up a smoothie of bean images or playing a high-tech game of “Find the Perfect Bean,” our AI models have got us covered. And the best part? No more trips to the hospital from bad beans. Beansy man to the rescue! 💪

In our next episode, we’ll dive into the nitty-gritty of uploading and tagging images for our tool. Trust me, it’s going to be a benign adventure, and you won’t want to miss it. Until then, keep your beans sorted. Get your beans together! 

Remember, no matter how messy life gets, just keep sorting through it one bean at a time -Mr. Bean.

This is Femi, signing off. Happy coding and happy bean picking!