Blog Post #6: Small Breaks During School Breaks

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog! Since last post, I’ve had two breaks: one was a week-long school break, and the other was a day-long break for Eid. Conversely, while I had fun with friends and family on Eid, I made good progress on my project over this week and school break.

For one, I managed to fix my problem with using my GPU to train my models (which probably should have happened earlier). The time taken to train my models has decreased approximately tenfold since my computer doesn’t have to solely rely on my CPU’s computing power. This change has also allowed me to make the proper modifications to my models to convert them to TFLite, a machine-learning format that is optimized for performance on mobile devices (more in this link: https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/guide). The only problem I have now is that Google Colab, the cloud-based platform I use to train my models, enforces limits on how much of its computing resources I use – I’m able to use it for about one or two hours before it restricts access to my GPU. Fortunately, I’ve been able to train and save a few preliminary models in that time.

I’m planning to test these models with a camera via a very simple user interface built using React Native. To do this I’ve found an app called Expo Go, which (in my few days of testing it) makes testing my app on my phone pretty simple. All I have to do is start a development server on my computer to host my app by running a few commands, which returns a QR code for me to scan with my phone. When I have the Expo Go mobile app installed on my phone, it takes this QR code and renders my app on the fly. It even reloads every time I make changes to the app. As a disclaimer I’ve just started to use Expo Go, so there still may be some unforeseen problems I encounter along the way.

As for the future, I’m planning for this app to be more of a proof-of-concept than anything – there are more aspects to app-making that I haven’t considered (i.e. security concerns). Next week, I’m planning to implement camera functionality on my app and possibly to test it with my trained models.

Until next time,
Elysse Ahmad Yusri