HackTX Hackathon
CV Smart Whiteboard — HackTX
2025
A $50 computer-vision alternative to a $5,000 smart whiteboard.
The idea
Commercial smart whiteboards cost around $5,000 — which is really a camera, a display, and software wearing a luxury price tag. At HackTX, my team built the same core capability with roughly $50 of hardware: a camera pointed at an ordinary whiteboard and a computer-vision pipeline that digitizes what’s written on it in real time.
Why it’s interesting
The engineering challenge is robustness on a budget: handling glare, occlusion from the person writing, and perspective distortion with commodity hardware and fast software instead of expensive sensors. It’s the same cost-collapse philosophy behind my low-field MRI research, applied in a weekend.
Demo
A working demo video from the hackathon is linked below.
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