Ailook on Tinker Edge T (TET)

---

This project is about cars plates recognition. The following content concerns setting it up on a Tinker Edge T board.

• Prerequisites
  • Install Tinker Edge T Software
  • Install OpenCV
  • Install Tesseract
  • Install Openalpr
• Run Script

Install Tinker Edge T Software

To Incorporate the Tinker edge T environment (software) it’s important to go to the following forum URL to download it:

https://tinker-board.asus.com/forum/index.php?/forum/5-software/

Then we need to unpackage it, Install the driver android_winusb.inf locate on:

Tinker_Edge_T-Mendel-Eagle-V3.0 2-20201015\tools\ASUS_Android_USB_drivers_for_Windows\Windows_XP_VISTA_7_8_8.1\Android

when the above is finished, we have to connect our PC to Tinker Edge T (with USB-C) and execute flash.cmd on windows or flash.sh on Linux.

Configure SSH into Tinker Edge T

It's important to maintain the connection between the PC and TET. So we are going to continue with installing:

py -m pip install --user mendel-development-tool

This allows us to SSH into TET:

mdt devices
mdt shell

Internet, timezones, update, and upgrade

When we want to connect our TET to the internet we just have to type nmtui this display a UI that allows us to interact with many available networks.

If we want to change the time zone, we can do it like this:

timedatectl list-timezones

The above will display timezones, we have to figure out our country <zone> and then type:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone <zone>
sudo timedatectl set-ntp yes
sudo reboot

Also, we have to update packages:

sudo apt-get update
curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt upgrade

It's necessary to download git:

sudo apt-get install git

Install Chromium and Jupyter-notebook

sudo apt-get install chromium
sudo apt-get install jupyter-notebook

To run:

chromium
sudo jupyter-notebook --allow-root 

Install OpenCV

These steps are based on how to install OpenCV in Ubuntu. The easy way to download is by typing sudo apt-get install python3-opencv, but this doesn't work very well with tesseract (that is what we will need to install also). So the correct way is the following.

sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove python3-opencv
sudo apt-get install cmake
sudo apt-get install gcc g++
sudo apt-get install python3-dev python3-numpy
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev
sudo apt-get install libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libopenexr-dev libtiff-dev libwebp-dev

Then we will continue to clone the OpenCV repository:

git clone https://github.com/opencv/opencv.git
cd opencv
mkdir build
cd build
sudo cmake ../
sudo make

It's possible we have an error during sudo make running, to fix it we have to follow the steps on: https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-add-swap-space-on-debian-10/

if The above step is done we continue with the following:

sudo make install

To import OpenCV in our script we have to create a file named site-packages.pth:

cd /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages
sudo vim site-packages.pth

and copy:

../site-packages

Now we can use OpenCV like this:

import cv2 as cv
print(cv.__version__)

The complete installation is here: https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/d2/de6/tutorial_py_setup_in_ubuntu.html

Install Tesseract

Before to clone Tesseract repository it's important install these requierements:

sudo apt-get install libleptonica-dev
sudo apt-get install automake libtool

Now we can clone repositpry from https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract.git

When the above is done, we continue doing the following:

cd tesseract
sudo ./autogen.sh
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
sudo make training
sudo make training-install

We have to download some traineddata:

cd /usr/local/share/tessdata
sudo wget https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/blob/main/eng.traineddata
sudo wget https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/blob/main/osd.traineddata

To test if this works go to https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.html#simplest-invocation-to-ocr-an-image

The complete description about this installation is here: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/main/INSTALL.GIT.md

Install Openalpr

We have to install prerequisites

sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev libtesseract-dev git cmake build-essential libleptonica-dev
sudo apt-get install liblog4cplus-dev libcurl3-dev
sudo apt-get install beanstalkd

Then we have to clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr.git

To setup follow these steps:

cd openalpr/src
mkdir build
cd build
sudo cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr -DCMAKE_INSTALL_SYSCONFDIR:PATH=/etc ..
sudo make
sudo make install

If you want to test:

sudo wget http://plates.openalpr.com/h786poj.jpg -O lp.jpg
alpr lp.jpg

or

cd openalpr/src/bindings/python/
sudo python3 setup.py install
sudo wget http://plates.openalpr.com/h786poj.jpg -O lp.jpg
sudo python3 test.py -c au lp.jpg   # au is a country (in this case australia)

The installation is the easiest way to install Openalpr, there are other ways, and we can found them here: https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr/wiki/Compilation-instructions-(Ubuntu-Linux)

Run Script

To run the script before we have to ensure all prerequisites are installed. So we have to clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/aionlux/toTET.git

The script will need some extra dependencies such as pyqt5, pycoral, pandas, numpy libraries. First it's necesary update and upgrade.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt5
sudo apt-get install python3-pycoral
sudo apt-get install python3-pandas
sudo apt-get install python3-numpy

Then we will go to ./toTET, create a directory called detected, change mode of plates.tflite, and install xorg. If for some cases we need to open an image we will use feh (it's optional)

cd toTET
sudo mkdir detected
sudo chmod 775 plates.tflite
sudo apt-get install xorg
sudo apt-get install feh

It's almost done. Before to run la script run.py we have to execute.

xhost local:root

Now

sudo python3 run.py