Now have it destroy people with perfectly calculated shots in 8-Ball

Idea to Improve this: Sort the words to solve not simply by length and alphabetically, but try to sort them so that any word that starts at a certain position follows after one that ends at the same position (or close to it). This would reduce travel time between words and get you closer to getting every word - especially for shorter words, a majority of the time is going to be spent traveling between words and not actually solving them.

For the character recognition, since it’s a known set of just 26 images with fixed sizes, I would ditch ocr all together and check against predefined images for what letter it is. If you really want speed, you could probably instead check individual pixels. I can’t imagine it taking more that 10 well chosen pixels to identify any letter, with the limit being 6 since 5 only have 16 combinations.

“What’s printer?” Your friends are funny bro! “

the fact that bambu printers don't support just senting GCODE over serial(USB) is wild, but I think there might be an unofficial on-printer octoprint plugin which whould allow you to use their api if you wanted to get it to start files for a future progect.

To prevent your stylus from destroying your phone, make sure you have a weak part in it that breaks _before_ your phone does. Think about how gas stations have break-away connectors so that driving away with the gas pump still in it doesn't spill gas everywhere and instead breaks apart in a controlled manner. While your print head might still be able to conflict with where your phone is and break it, at least incorrectly mounting the stylus won't screw up your phone

My collage has a big AG section, so the robotics team made a small seed planter that would dig a hole, add a seed, and water it before going to the next spot. The instructor called it “A 3D printer with an identity crisis” when it was watering it thought it was turning on the fan. (It used a printers boards)

A less squishy stylus would probably recognize better at higher speeds

the cheaper printers are usually less hassle when it comes to "non-standard tasks", since most of them use off the shelf microcontrollers with open source software.

Idk if you are already doing this but you can try to prefer words that starts with a letter that was a last letter in the previous word, example: cat - ton - new - win ...

Regarding the janky OCR: I think Tesseract is specifically meant for books, not individual letters. You'd probably have better luck with a simpler library that identifies single characters 👀

there are some things you can do to improve the movement system just a bit and possibly break 60k points on average: 1. increase the movement speed of the XY axis by appending the F argument to the G0/G1 command (view the marlin docs on G0/G1) 2. decrease the Z hopping height as much as you can or speed it up more, or just start moving as it hops back up (using a smaller stylus could make this easier) and pytesseract sucks because of the font wordhunt uses, maybe you can try a different OCR model?

7:45 “using some really basic math-“ Proceeds to show not one single number and the absolute value of Poseidons trident.

This is great! Since you asked for improvement ideas you can get styluses with non-squishy tips - kinda like cheap Apple pencils - which may reduce lag

Really creative idea and smartly executed. It's cool to see you expanding your projects more into engineering cause you get to actually unleash them into the real world, and I am happy to have been a small part of this one :). 12:38 is some fire editing 💯

Great project! I also had the unsatiable desire to destroy my friends in word hunt. It was fun seeing someone else approach the problem (domination in silly word game) and your solution was objectively better (in my defense i was a junior in highschool) I could also never figure how to actually make it input on the phone (although i HAD thought about robot stylus i just couldnt rationalize it) so it was really fun seeing you succeed! thanks for sharing

I dig the fact that you always wanted a 3D printer and now that you have one, landed on an A1 Mini. I’ve done my fair share of printer nonsense over the years. I’m certain that with your ingenuity only great things can come from your newfound resource. Great video, thanks for sharing. Cheers

Great video, you walked through the whole process which was fantastic. Short and concise. I'll be checking out your other videos.

One more idea for impoving this masterpiece of a comouter science project would be to sort the words in decreasing value order (longest to shortest, or whatever else the game uses), so that the printer starts with these first

there are libraries to inject instruction to the printer via MQTT else, really nice Project !

Made a project like this minus the automatic input for the SpellCast word game on Discord, love how far you took the idea. Tries really come in clutch for this application.

Improvement idea to maximize score with current setup. Reverse sort your results list so it starts by playing the largest/longest words first and works its way down to the 2-3-4 letter words. Great work loved this project. First time watcher but you’ve got one new subscriber here. :)

Cool project, and the editing was great. Keep them coming man :)

Thank you for the great video and props for taking the time to put in music credits

BRO - you're doing what I've been daydreaming about for a couple years!! I just have no clue how to script and create codes for something like this, but you've seriously inspired me to try this myself! It would be sick to collaborate with someone who knows how to do stuff like this and learn from ya :D

dude! this is amazing! id love to see another video of the updated ideas you have

Really nice video, that I stumbled randomly on. Good luck on your KZfaq adventure :)

Haha this is great! Loved the video and the iteration process of your code and design. I wonder if you can increase the rapid travel move for the printer. This would allow it to retract faster and make travel moves faster. Some of the corexy motion systems would have insane travel speeds. The stylus would be a blur from moving so fast, and you could probably get a higher score. Sometimes when you just give the machine coordinates it moves at the “rapid” speed and this can be changed in the machine firmware.

Nice work! To speed up things: - Speed up letter recognition. Maybe just grab all the letters and compare each one. Even if it take the same amount of time(it wont) you will be way more reliable. - Try to find a way to inject the gcode directly. I can't believe such a pricey printer don't have a way to gobble up streamed gcode... - Change your paths. instead of doing (0,0,0) -> (0,0,10) -> (2,3,10) -> (2,3,0) , do (0,0,0) -> (1,1.5,10) -> (2,3,0) (it would make a triangle hop instead of a square one) - Also, use G0 if you didn't already, it is supposed (even if not always correctly coded) to be faster by don't guarantying using straight lines. - As other said, if you have done all of that, maybe try reorganizing the words. I would insert short ones to link the big ones at the start. It won't be that easy to code tho. Thank you for this fun video!

If you do a little Post-Processing on the word list you generate, you can minimize your total path length and time spent not touching the phone, which will get you a lot more complete games. Also, it won't be a big optimization, but aiming for the center of each square is further than you necessarily need, so allowing the bot to cut some corners will save a couple precious hundredths of a second. I couldn't tell exactly how you're generating your trie or searching it, but my guess is there are some really fun encoding tricks that would save a lot of time as well. Matt Parker's video about how his viewers improved the speed of his code by like 22 million percent came to mind since this is also a word tree search problem.

For the OCR thing, since the letters are identical all the time, you could go with taking reference images of the letters, comparing them to the images you have in the current game and whichever image has the highest % of similarity (should be around 99-100%...) is the correct one. You don't even have to do any processing beyond cropping.

I am certain you could get your printer to start the files automatically. I use Orca Slicer, which is open source I think, and it communicates with my P1S over my LAN no problems. Great project. I enjoyed coming on this journey with you

If you can get a felt tip styles for better accuracy and less resistance. Get a diy driver board for the motors and use octoprint for more automatic control. Possibly a camera, or just a simple timer, on the print head to detect a changed screen and stop the print

I've had similar problems with tesseract, my solution was just to have a bunch of reference Pngs (one for each letter) and then just count how many pixels "match" for each one. since the font/backgrounds dont change this is very accurate. You can still apply image cleanup before as long as your reference images are close to the cleaned up images.

The lesson I hope you learned from this. Don't listen to KZfaq hype and always go open source... Open source printers can be controlled directly saving the need to waste time uploading the solution. Effectively turning the printer into a real time robot. That opens the door to solve all kinds of games. I don't play games but fruit ninja springs to mind.

Yo this wild seriously impressive :O I didn't even realize you could use a 3d printer like that

I don't know it the bamboo labs printer have this option but you could connect the printer to the PC over USB, connect to the serial port of the printer from the python script and send the gcode commands that way. Really cool video and an interesting idea for a project. I might try doing something else then printing with my 3d printer now after this 😄

Interesting video! For sending the gcode, maybe you could have tried another slicing software? I use Cura for my prints, but I might try Orca. One of those should support both arbitrary gcode and network printing, otherwise I'd be very surprised lmao. But idk, seems like even what you have so far is pretty efficient, so if it ain't broke…

I think it would be streamlined more to have a single process like RPI controlling printer directly (octoprint-klipper) and some webcam and processing on the RPI. If fast enough might not even need to pause the game. It may start with a word and by the time it moves the head it might have a bunch more. Also idk what path you generate for corners, but i'd do a large radius to not hit max accelearion in corners. Some mechanical improvements: Ged a static bed instead of a bed slinger like corexy, cathesian ender 5 style or delta A delta printer might offer interesting advantages out of the box with fast presets and light print head and bed is static. Then ditch the print head (the heavyweight printhead slows down the max speed and acceleration). Then move to faster Z (minmize Z hop maybe a harder stylus) with belted Z or even better is to hook and induction coil to act as a solenoid to pop up-down the stylus. Then furter make it faster by converting to larger pulleys, bigger steppers.. test to find max speed and acceleration supported. If skipping is not occuring, then bigger pulley on motor will grant more speed. Repeat until it skips. It might go with crazy 600mm/s+ even more with a lighthead stylus. For this i bet a delta conversion is beter suited beacuse the deleted printhead was the only mass that was limiting the acceleration and speed. Without it might reach speeds beyond 3d printing realm (maybe 1000-2000mm/s, maybe more idk). Corexy has the whole gantry to move that is the same mass, and bedslingers have the whole bed + phone so a delta might be the best. An even higher tier of mods might be with cone angle movements instead of stylus moving. To further increase speed, maybe moving the whole stylus is not the route. Maybe have a ball joint on a very long stylus and angle it to reach the phone. It can have two axis with strings to hook on the end of the stylus to angle it. Math will get harder but doable. Also when everything is maxxed, then it comes nema23 and other bigger grunty-er steppers and servos that can really speed up crazy fast (it can have a redection gear to raise the speed and lower the torque) It would be interesting to see further versions of this mobilephone games ultimate destroyer.

Things I think to improve it: Remove weight from moving parts Arrange the word order so that words starting with the letter the stylus is currently on are the next to be written. You can then also code an algorithm that calculates the correct word order to minimize the distance traveled and achieve the highest possible score.

You could speed it up by haveing the next word start with a nearby letter Also having the correct index of words This is incredible! I can't believe it worked first try!

dude thats such a cool project, how do you not have more views/subs?

You can probably up the speed and acceleration in the gcode to move faster. Also, could have the solver start the next word from the last letter of the previous word to waste less time moving. Nice work!

No way, I commented on this on Reddit not too long ago, and now the algorithm has brought me to the video. Awesome man!

Nice work, Brendan! Just a quick tip: Maybe import the other files instead of calling them via subprocess.

To limit acceleration issues, consider using arc gcode commands. If you draw a pseudo bezier through the words it will get rid of most of the abrupt angle changes. Like you said already sorting the list to word-centipede chain the entries you could save a bit of time. Prioritize longer words but if you can insert a short word between long ones... You'll still finish all your long words but the cut jog time should get more in...(definitely, yes, supreme, end, diatribe -- instead of definitely /jog/ supreme /jog/ diatribe ...)Do like maze solving robot mice and cut every corner possible.

Great project, very interesting hiccups along the way, I thought solving the puzzle was gonna be the hardest

As for the letters, split them in separate images and then run OCR, it will most likely be 100% as with the current setup it tries to connect before/after letters into something more meaningful than just A or F or X.

this was awesome! do all boards given by the game yield the same number of points? I see you solve the longer words first, but maybe you could make the program optimize the score by including the time that it takes to make a given word.

A different printer that is not closed source and more basic, it's possible to take off the print head and hold only the stylus. Less weight and upping the speed should make it ever better since it does not have to worry about wobble or extruding. Still really cool idea and amazed how well it works.

IDK if you've done this but sort the word list so the starting character of the next word matches the finishing character of the previous word. You can also optimize the path the printer takes, it doesn't need to travel right through the center of each word, it can take racing lines lol. If you want to go even further, you could include the printer travel speed into the calculations and select the most optimal words in terms of score vs speed, so if it regularly gets partway through the 4 letter words, you can pick the best of them.

This has to be the best video on this platform damn

You should try upping acceleration >:) Also if you ever want a better 3d printer consider something running klipper (voron, annex k3, custom built) :P

I cant tell you how much ive loved this video. Amazing 💪

Very cool!! A couple of armchair suggestions... Tesseract works better against B&W images than color, even seemingly black and white ones on the screen. Given you know the space each letter occupies, you might consider either only evaluating regions, or consider easyOCR, but easyOCR needs a word model, so I don't know if it can pick up on single letters. You'd still want to use regions, however because both packages are kind of a PITA in only finding first instances. A cheaper printer, like the low end Creality printer, allow for use of programs (like OctoPrint and others) that can allow live writing of gcode commands via terminal to output to the printer. You could stream your commands instead of creating a .gcode file to recover the FTP time. Lastly, since you find the solver list up front, inverting it to maximize the higher points from the longer words first could goose your score. Thanks for the fun watch!

Here are a few ideas for increasing the score: 1. Use a less mushy stylus, small improvement but it could let you be more precise with raising lowering the pen. 2. Instead of moving from one word to the next based on which one is bigger, move to the next word by only raising the pen if it is absolutely necessary. This could be done by: char a = last character of the word you just solved char b = first character of the word you are going to solve next find a word in the list that starts with the a and ends with b and if a path can be created for that word starting and ending at the correct spots. Solve that word and you should be ready to solve the next biggest word. Only raise the pen if you cannot find an intermediary word.

this is really cool!

Amazing! I got two questions: do you solve the longest words first? Second: do you solve words that are the closest to the end of the last word rather than words further away? Maybe these are some changes that could even improve the score. Great work!

with jailbreaking you could use veency, also, very cool!

Reeeeealy nice Idea and implementation!

What are friends for if you can't totally destroy them 😆 Great project!

Interesting. Ideaa: * use a camera to capture screen, and make the whole thing stand alone to play one game after another. * for OCR maybe a small neuronal network trained to solve the 26 char images, very super specific, low resolution will cut it. ** if fully automated: are the buttons to start etc always on the same locations? * make it that you just put the phone on the bed, with app load to start the runs. yes any orientation :) Show the full "AI" Also, I get a clear message from this video: do not buy bambu printer due to proprietary closed interface, that sucks.

I saw some other recommendations for faster solutions, but honestly a really easy solution would be to just increase the speed of the movements. I haven’t used a Bambu labs printer, but I imagine there’s options like most other printers to increase “printing speed”, because while it goes fast now, it can definitely move faster

honestly best bambu lab ad i ever see that printer is very good and reliable tho for $249 con is about 3-5 time the price for its part(when need to repair) and closed source hard to mod its software(but it already refine by company) pro is best plug and play printer for today

Honestly, it's the coolest thing I have seen in a while.

I think redesigning the stylus holder to make it a bit stiffer, adjusting the z axis to the absolute minimum height required for the stylus to work (so its lightly touching it as it seems its pressing down quite a bit in the video) and reducing your z hop height, increase your acceleration would allow you to increase the speed i think. Couple with whatever back end programming wizardry you can achieve i think you could easily get double the scores.

Instead of ocr i think just hard coding the position of each letter then then just compare it to the font directly will completely break it if you wanted to use a diffrent verison of word hunt with a different font, but would be very fast and simple

just flip the results file upside down - so the longest words are done first, then it proceeds with the shorter one's. That way the travel time of the stylos is optimized. You can optimize it even further by running an algorythm over it to arrange the words in such a way one word ends right next to the square of the next starting letter or minimal movement time. That way you should do a few more words extra withint he time limit. And lastly - try automation though Octoprint. That way your software talks directly to your printer, so no manual steps anymore. Should also save you a few seconds.

It seems like from the video that it is possible that the word number 0 ends in a corner and the word number 1 starts on the opposite corner. It would be nice to also sort the words for the smallest distance of the previous one ending. This could be tricky because the best word after one might be so small that it's best to do another one that is further away.

Great project! I did a simular thing with BookWorm for the PC, Although being PC based i could just manipulate the mouse. Post an update please if you make any improvements. I suspect you got addicted to watching it run for a while 😂

Also - I think a way to maximize your potential max score would be to organize your words based on the position of the last letter of the previous word so that the move doesn’t need to be across the screen to start the next word, obviously this only works for a certain period of time depending upon the letters you get and the words you can make, but it would be a great way to boost through the majority of your dictionary really fast I think.

That was really cool , well impressed

I just bought that same printer a week ago, it's so cool :)

I had the same problem with tesseract (you need to configure it very accurately), instead I used EasyOCR (also python). It works really well and lets you train your own recognizer if needed (I'd just crop line by line and recognize them)

one simple tip that could marginally improve scores, you can make the printer take a shorter path by making it go to the edges of the squares instead of the middle

I rememeber doing sort of the same thing couple years ago minus using the 3D printer to physically insert the words. My solution was using messenger variant of this app in regular browser on PC and writing a Python program that used selenium to control and extract stuff from browser and emulated mouse on top of it which iirc was significantly faster. Too bad my way of finding valid words was jank af compared to yours so it could never find the really juicy long ones, but it still absolutely smoked my wife at the game.

If someone beat me that HARD in WordHunt I'll get traumatized

Funny, an interview question I used to ask many candidates is 'boggle solver' where I get them to spit out a list of possible words. The ideal solution of course uses the trie and DFS. Maybe I should get them to output gcode too 😂

And Skynet was born 😊 Fascinating video

Came for the idea Stayed for the prolapse and turdions

Great job. Maybe use a hard tip touch stylus and a spring to get better contact and go faster.

There are many open source ocr implementations of single font detection of letters, or you can train one yourself. I can help if you need a custom neural net, but I think there's more than enough online to get you started with :D

random idea run the solved game list of words through a tie algorithm to get a list of words based on last letter of the first word and the first letter of the next. so if for example the first word is word and the second is droves it is preferred and the longest sequence gets put in first and then remove the already solved words from the list and repeat until you only have single words?

improvement: sort withing each length group so that the words start with the same position* as the previous one ended * not necessarily letter, because letters can be duplicated example with numbers: 123456, 654, 432

You know, if your goal is to solve all possible words, you probably should program it to solve words not in point order priority, not in alphabetical priority, but where the last letter of one word is the first of the next one. So, after solving for piano, the next word could be opinion, followed by nap, etc. This decreases the transit time between words. What little I know about sorting algorithms says this could be really hard, but it would definitely be faster.

THIS IS SO COOL! Future project idea: use the printer to type things on a keyboard, a wireless one for example and make it speedrun wordle.

Some slicer programs have print time estimations. You could try to calculate out the print time to exactly the game length time so that the stylus lifts once the time has run out.

You could also increase the accel and max speed of the printer and raise the stylus a little higher (for less friction) and you should be able to go at least 2x as fast. These little printers are super robust and could likely go extremely fast You could also optimize the words to have as little travel between them as possible, though that might trade off max points for speed of completion, so IDK

You can optimize the print by sorting the words in a way where the next word starts at the location where previous word ended

How do you not have like a million subs man

You could try to make the first letter of the next word match whatever letter was right next to the last letter of the previous word in the direction the printer was traveling in to reduce travel time between words.

Since you already have the list created, you could add another sort where it optimizes the list based on closeness of words. Basically prioritize the words by how close they are when drawn.

A trie isn't the most time-efficient way to do this. A sorted list of words, with a prefix search done via binary search, tends to be faster, at least in C++, and the performance characteristics at play make it seem that in Python the time savings would be even better. And since you can just store the wordlist pre-sorted, the loading phase means just loading it into memory. In Python you can implement a binary search using 'bisect' and its default behavior will be a prefix search.

Another improvement idea… watch the screen for the countdown timer or the end screen. And have the stylus lift / home when the game is done.

instead of moving in angles, you could improve the path a little. Rounded corners would increase the top-speed and precision for the print head and reduce slippage for the stylus. also you could control the printer with a raspberry pi and octoprint. The it can send the g-code to the printer via usb and safe time during the startup. And since octoprint already has a web-cam interface, it should even be possible to implement the entire thing as a octo-print plugin. (I guess the hardest part would be to reliably extract the text from the webcam)

IDK how hard this would be for you, but you might want to have some kind of image recognition to detect whether a word was accepted by the game. It would help prune words from the scrabble list that aren't in the game's dictionary. It would need some amount of slop, though, to account for words which may have just been misinputed by the printer

u can also try to add checking for word length and word score so first of all algorithm finds these words to get best score and after that other shorty words

Getting a Bambulab printer as your first is pretty sick, you'll not be disappointed in the printer. The closed source thing kinda sucks, but their value proposition is kinda unmatched rn.

You could probably run close to double those speeds and still be accurate. You got this easy.

1 question tho why? All seriousness tho this is crazy impressive and cool great job subscribed