Project Lithium

3 min readDec 24, 2020

You want a smart tablet? You got it!

Project Lithium is an ML based object tracking and locating software, that helps anyone take an ordinary whiteboard and convert it into a smart writing tablet. The goal is to have nothing more than a stand and some tracking stickers to get started.

Why should it exist?

The year is 2020 everyone is shoved into their homes weather they like it or not, it’s hard for everyone. According to UNESCO

at the height of the pandemic, schools, universities and other learning institutions were closed in more than 190 countries, disrupting the education of 1.6 billion students with hundreds of millions of children and youth unable to continue their learning. Much of practical training for skills development was interrupted. There is growing evidence that even the best distance learning solutions are weak substitutes for classroom interactions and millions of disadvantaged students may not return to school

It’s been a tough year for education as a whole, but this did not stop both the teachers and the students, almost all education was taken online with little to no compromises, but there still are various teachers who want to express themselves better for their students but just CANNOT do so as they are limited by the hardware, they possess. Some teachers would love to use something like a writing pad where it helps both the student understand and learn the subject better whereas it helps the teacher maintain a sort of flow and stop writing and re writing the same things over and over again.

So, Project Lithium has two components, a small hardware kid (made of paper/cardboard) and an app on your smartphone.

How does it work?

The app in tandem with the hardware kid lets you map your movement on your whiteboard on your pc like a digital tablet would, but it is almost inexpensive and can work on any surface.

The Hardware

The hardware for the project is all a part of the kit that should cost under Rs .20 for production overall. It has two parts:

A phone stand/holder that holds the device in place for the ar to align with the whiteboard.
AR tracking stickers, long strips that have unique symbols on them that help with the AR tracking.

The App

The app works on AR motion tracking, if it needs to be more optimized ML could be integrated into it.

The app can also have different use cases like teaching how to write or for people to learn character-oriented languages like mandarin etc., overall, it can be used as a handwriting and movement tracking and training app.

Another use case can be making the app open source where anyone who uses the app can use the raw data of the motion of the whiteboard maker tip, which makes it easier for other developers to work of off to make amazing things.

Need of the hour

With everything going on I personally think it is the need of the hour for two reasons the idea sort of grows obsolete as the need shrinks and second this is when it is required, you cannot stop education or the spread o knowledge due to a stupid worldwide pandemic.