Simon Lövskog is a born hacker. At the age of one, he started hanging out in his dad’s lab. By five years old, he had built his first computer. And at thirteen, we hacked a robot vacuum cleaner with a Pi-powered facial recognition.

Son of Thomas (who also started out very young, building his first transceiver when he was nine, and then went on to become the CEO of Additude Innovation in Sweden), Simon likes to use projects to explore and learn… and to have fun. That was the case with this project. He wanted to learn about image processing and detection, so that’s exactly what he did!

Being the first time he’d ever worked with image recognition, there was an element of trial and error. When he started hardcoding the images, he realised it wasn’t going to work as the database grew. He also found he had a problem with getting the robot to be quiet, which irritated his mum, to say the least.