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reading a normal scale with an Iphone?

By Exodia, 29 June, 2022

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hey everybody. I am curious about something. Is it possible to read the numbers on a normal household scale with your phone without having to buy a smart scale or one that talks? And just to clarify, I’m talking about one of those scales that you step on. I talked to my mom about possibly getting one of those talking scales but she said she doesn't want one that spills out her wait to everyone in the vicinity.

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Possibly, unless it's an…

By The Oliver Kennett

8 months 3 weeks ago

Possibly, unless it's an analogue one with a mechanical dial.

I've got the active era bathroom scales which have a visual display but, if you have the app, it automatically connects and gives you accessible feedback on your device screen. It was about £30 which, I think, is about what you'd pay for a talking scale or even a standard and dumb set of bathroom scales.

This one also calculates body fat, muscle mass and syncs with apple health to give BMI, target weight and all those good stats... that make us feel bad.

Hope this helps.

Completely digital

By Exodia

8 months 3 weeks ago

Thank you. Our scale is completely digital. Now, what would be a good app to use to read the display?

Re: What app to use to read the scale

By peter

8 months 3 weeks ago

You can try using the iPhone's camera to read the scale. When focus is in the viewfinder portion of the app, Voiceover will describe what the camera is seeing and often read any text in the picture. You don't even have to take a picture.

As a side note, the camera app can also be used this way to find objects in a room or something you dropped on the floor. Very useful.

If that doesn't work as easily as you would like, you can also try using the Seeing AI app from Microsoft (which is free). The app has several modes for things like identifying text, colors, lights on/off, currency, etc. The "short text" mode is the best one to use for this application. This uses the phone's camera to capture real time video and OCR any text as you move the camera.

Hope that helps.

--Pete

Digital

By CuriousNetEntity

8 months 3 weeks ago

A pet peeve of mine: I haven't found any app that will read segmented digital displays. Unfortunately, that is exactly the type of display so many devices use to display numbers. The apps already mentioned do great for large and small LCD screens.

Short text

By Edward Louie

8 months 3 weeks ago

I find that I can read digital displays using the Seeing AI short text Channel

Nice

By Exodia

8 months 3 weeks ago

That’s really awesome. Speaking of digital displays, would it be possible to read my scanner display the same way? I have a bearcat radio scanner, but I can’t read the display to see what frequency I am picking up.

Depends

By Edward Louie

8 months 3 weeks ago

For a digital display that is that small, this will require seeing AI and text channel plus additional lighting in order to make it read that type of digital display.
It will be really challenging and results may not be accurate since it’s only a one or two digit number, most of those radios/walkie-talkies only have 22 channels, so this will require you to have the lights on if you’re in your room and when voiceover read something, do not move your phone in anyway otherwise it’s going to mess up the results

It’s a scanner with a small display

By Exodia

8 months 3 weeks ago

The scanner that I have is a bearcat 355n and the display is rather small. I tried reading it with seeing AI before, and it mainly read the labels on the buttons. If only I could get it to focus on one particular area of the scanner, it would be a lot easier to get the correct Reading of the frequency that it is tuned to.

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