Filling the days

rexvos

How is everyone adapting to sheltering in place?

I travel for a living and work in outside sales. I have been home for a month now. I live in Louisiana so with the situation here it is pretty much do not leave the house except for groceries.

Besides keeping up with work I have managed to

1. Put every card I have in order. (This is no small task) I have over 520,000 listed on Sportlots and have several sets that are in various stage of completion. (Finished this today)
2. Started a new book by one of my favorite authors Jeff Pearlman on the rise and fall of the USFL
3. Have a different family member every night plan and host a game show for the family to compete (tonight my son hosted Jeopardy)
4. Had one week when my wife was sick and she quarantined herself to the back bedroom as to not infect others, turns out she did not have the virus, but I did all the cooking and such.

I have somehow avoided cleaning out the garage, which is probably tomorrow’s project.

How are you spending your days?

pab1969

I am one of the fortunate ones to have part time hours of work that gets me out of the house. But when I am confined, I started a baseball season on playstation since the real one is postponed. I listed items to sell way more than usual on eBay and Craigslist. Surprisingly sales are good on both ends. I have everything I need for yard work but the weather hasn't cooperated. I started jogging again, trying to run twice a week. Finally, I too have been avoiding the garage clean up.

dad2cl3

It’s hard to believe, but the lockdown has made it busier for our house. My wife and I are blessed to both work in essential industries. Her in transportation and me in financial services. Both of us have the ability to work remotely so work has not stopped for either of us.

We’re also blessed with four school age children in second, sixth, and ninth grade. All attend schools that were well prepared for the lockdown and home schooling. As a result, we’ve just completed our fourth week of home schooling while also both working from home full time.

In addition, we’ve seen a noticeable uptick in the amount of cooking and cleaning due to the extra meals at home and the kids entertaining themselves in the house.

Needless to say, my wife and I have no trouble falling sleep at night lol. Most importantly, everyone remains healthy and we’re all happy. Hopefully the same is true for you and yours if you are reading this.

I had thought I might get some time to work on several card-related projects through all of this, but time seems to sneak away from me everyday. Spring Break started today so maybe I’ll get something done finally!

Jason

DBesse27

I’m also in outside sales and also working from home. I had hoped to use some of my non work time to organize my cards, and I’ve got some done, but not as much as I expected. I’ve been careful to make time for family and limit the card time. I have been able to update my inventory spreadsheets that had been neglected for months, and catch up on scanning, so that’s good. I would like to list more cards for sale but haven’t gotten there yet.

Moonman

All healthy in my house, I have not missed a minute of work, I am a Respiratory Therapist and so I am right on the front lines of this thing. While I can say its not as scary as the media would have you believe, its still very real and people do die. Stay healthy everyone and keep posting pictures of your collection. Its a nice vacation from the war

rexvos

Did not get to the garage today either but I was able to consolidate cards into three less boxes. That’s a big win because my storage room for bulk stuff is nearing capacity.

dad2cl3

This thread inspired me to tackle one of the projects I have been contemplating for awhile. I don't use a scanner to capture images of my slabs. I prefer using a camera mainly because I like photography. I also love single board computers and computer programming. As a result, I've been contemplating how I could use a single board computer to capture images of slabs. Vanity project to fill my downtime...most definitely.

Here is my prototype using a Raspberry Pi 3B+ SBC:

The camera is started from the command line and awaits the press of the button found on the breadboard at the base of the camera mount. Once pressed, the image is captured in memory and is rotated and cropped to size. The application then scans the slab to obtain the cert number using optical character recognition. If a cert is not found (remember prototype :-)), the application pauses to allow one to be keyed in manually. The image is saved locally on the Raspberry Pi in a folder that is shared within our home network on a network file server which allows me to access the image from my MacBook. Lastly, it also uploads the saved image to my Google Drive so that I have access to my slabs anywhere I can access Google Drive.

Here's a recent sample:

I've still got a few kinks to work out including better lighting. The flip isn't as crisp as I would like it to be and I suspect too much light is hitting the slab. Also, there is a small LED on the camera body that is on when the camera is active and shows up in the pictures. Lastly, I'd like to build a permanent mount that will allow me to more quickly swap out slabs. As you can see, i have dedicated a square for the task lol.

Now if only PSA exposed an API that would allow me to automatically upload to my set registry...

Jason

80sOPC

What a cool project!

krisd3279

Very cool! I totally agree they should expose an API to add a card to your set registry and upload an image of it. If they did that my desk would look very similar to yours.

dad2cl3

Working on auto cropping. The hope is that determining the boundaries of the slab can tell me how square the camera is to the slab as well as crop the image.

Here’s the raw image:

Here’s the cropped image:

The background is simple black construction paper. I think I’ve got two problems: the lighting still needs refinement and the consistency of the color in the construction paper is not great.

Jason

miwlvrn

@rexvos said:

1. Put every card I have in order. (This is no small task) I have over 520,000 listed on Sportlots and have several sets that are in various stage of completion. (Finished this today)

Wow! How much per month does it cost to maintain that volume on Sportlots in listing fees (not including commission fees from sales)?

rexvos

@miwlvrn said:

@rexvos said:

1. Put every card I have in order. (This is no small task) I have over 520,000 listed on Sportlots and have several sets that are in various stage of completion. (Finished this today)

Wow! How much per month does it cost to maintain that volume on Sportlots in listing fees (not including commission fees from sales)?

1. Listing is free unless it is an auction I pay a hefty amount of fees but the lowest you can sell for is .18 so it is worth it to me.

kmnorton

@Moonman said:
All healthy in my house, I have not missed a minute of work, I am a Respiratory Therapist and so I am right on the front lines of this thing. While I can say its not as scary as the media would have you believe, its still very real and people do die. Stay healthy everyone and keep posting pictures of your collection. Its a nice vacation from the war

Thank you for what you do!

Gilbey

I'm at work every day as a logistics manager specializing in hazardous materials. You wouldn't believe the amount of isopropyl alcohol we ship every day.

dad2cl3

Upgraded to 12MP lens

Got the lens centered

dad2cl3

So I have pretty much given up on the Raspberry Pi camera. I just couldn't eliminate the barreling effect that is so noticeable in the image above. Also, the mount was very sensitive to movement. Bumping it meant several minutes of correction to get the autocropping to work appropriately and lighting was a total pain in the @$$.

I spent some time looking at @NGS428 scanning guide and did some additional research based on his CCD vs CIS recommendations. As a result, I cashed in a pile of Best Buy rewards points and bought an Epson Perfection V600. Needless to say, I'm really pleased with my results so far.

What I did bring forward from my Raspberry Pi tinkering is the post-processing of the scans. The post-processing does several things such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in order to read the certification number, renames the raw scans, and creates several composite images. Because the scanning has worked so well, I decided to share the code and write a wiki on Github for folks who might be interested.

The wiki is still a work in progress and borrows heavily from the original guide authored by @NGS428 who was gracious enough to give his permission to me borrowing/stealing as much as I felt appropriate with only the promise of a citation on Github :-)

Thanks,

Jason