2024
I Put ChatGPT Into an Eraser
I built a tiny ChatGPT-powered eraser prototype with a camera, OCR pipeline, home server API, OLED display, and 3D printed enclosure.
Video summary
I put ChatGPT into an eraser as a playful AI hardware build. The video follows the full prototype from camera input to answer output: capturing a question with a tiny camera, sending the image to my home server, extracting the text with OCR, asking ChatGPT for an answer, and showing the response on an OLED screen inside the eraser enclosure.
What I built
I programmed a Wi-Fi camera microcontroller to capture images and stream them to a server in chunks because it did not have enough RAM for full-resolution images. On the server, I reconstructed the image, ran OCR, tried image preprocessing steps like upscaling, thresholding, noise removal, and smoothing, then sent the extracted text through a prompt that handled messy OCR output before returning the answer to the eraser display.
Technical takeaways
The hardest constraints were image quality, limited microcontroller memory, and fitting the wiring, screen, power switch, camera button, and battery around an eraser-sized enclosure. A custom PCB would have made the hardware cleaner, but I wanted to finish the prototype quickly, so I made the wiring fit, 3D printed a case, painted it blue, and mounted an eraser on top. The result is intentionally absurd, but it shows an end-to-end AI hardware loop from camera input to model response.