Build Yourself an AI Powered Microscope – DevConf 2024

Thank you everyone who attended my session at both DevConf Cape Town and Johannesburg
I met so many awesome people during DevConf inside and outside of my session! Thank you for making DevConf 2024 the incredibile conference it was!

I’ve included the slides for those interested in building your own DIY Microscope, or something similar to help you with your own accessibility challenges. If you have an imaging device with some intelligence, there’s so many things you can do!

The project is using a Raspberry Pi 3B (4 and 5 works too). It is build using C# and .NET 8. The user interface is created using AvaloniaUI. There’s nothing better that Avalonia if you need to create small, incredibly fast user interfaces on Linux using .NET. I really recommend trying it out!

The backend is using Azure CosmosDB for storage. The MongoDB VCore Implementation. This is chosen for it’s vector search capabilities. Perfect for a conversational solution using OpenAI.

The slides can be found below

The whole premise of the talk was to inspire developers to think about using all these tech components in your toolbox. Both AI and IoT bits and use it for good. There’s so many solutions that could be created especially for accessibility, to make people’s life a little easier. This is also exactly why I created this Microscope, to solve my own accessibility problems when building IoT solutions. Think about what you could do!

Recorded Demos

Demo of analysing a Gigatron board
Unicorn HATs and dynamic lighting!
Using a Conversational Interface
Looking a ZX Spectrum RAM Chips
Helios Speaks Afrikaans!

The Microscope Tech Stack

.NET 8 (C#) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotnet-8/overview

Avalonia UI https://avaloniaui.net/

SkiaSharp https://github.com/mono/SkiaSharp

Azure CosmosDB https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cosmos-db

Azure AI Vision https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/ai-vision

Azure Speech https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/ai-speech

Azure OpenAI https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/openai-service

Azure IoT Edge https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/iot-edge

Docker https://www.docker.com/

Mosquito MQTT https://mosquitto.org/

The components used can be found here. You can put this all together yourself!

Some photos of the session at DevConf 2024

I hope to see you next time! Happy building and learning with cool tech!!! 😍