Beat the Heat With a Face-Tracking Desk Fan

If you’ve ever been sweating your ass off in your cubicle or apartment and wish you had some relief, Devin LaCrosse has come up with a clever solution. The software engineer built a Raspberry Pi-powered desk fan capable of tracking a person’s face as they move and then blasting cool air in their direction.

To accomplish this, the aptly named FanBot uses a small PC fan and USB webcam, connected to the Pi, along with OpenCV’s computer vision and machine learning software.

This is more of a proof of concept than a finished beautified product. It is for a intermediate develope… this project will get you a working version of openCV 3.0.0 on the Raspberry Pi 2. It will teach you a little about pulse width modulation (PWM) and how to control a servo with the general purpose input/output (GPIO) pins on the RPi.

If this sounds like a FANtastic idea, then be sure to check out its project page here.