Identify any brick in the blink of an eye!

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, Piqabrick instantly identifies LEGO® bricks’ code, simplifying the long-lasting operations of searching and sorting.

How to Piqabrick

Piqabrick is made of an hardware and a software. The hardware is the Piqabrick Box, made of a Top—with a camera, to acquire images, and LEDs to provide the perfect illumination—. The Top goes on top (of course… ?) of the Body of the Piqabrick Box which is… made of LEGO®! The software is a web dashboard, so no software installation is required.

See what the creator of Brickset, Huw Millington thinks about Piqabrick: 

Our beta-testers team is made of selected brick lovers around the globe, their videos shows you what Piqabrick can do.

Simon, Germany: 

Chris, U.K.:

Brian, U.S.A.: 

 

 

Piqabrick Box

• Small dimensions: 13 x 13 x 17 cm
• USB Socket for connecting both PC and MAC
• No setup needed
   

The Piqabrick Box is the place where you can arrange your bricks to identify and inventory them. The Box is made of two parts, the Top and the Body. 

The Top is made up of an electronic board with a 5 MP camera and 20 LEDs to provide the right illumination. This guarantees to maintain the same qualitative standard necessary for the brick identification. The Top is exactly 16×16 brick units wide and 4 brick units tall so it fits in your creations. 

Piqabrick can identify bricks up to 10 x 12 wide. 

The Body of the Box is made of LEGO® bricks! It measures 16×16 brick units wide and 12 brick units tall.

Can’t wait for your Piqabrick Box? Download here the instructions to build the Body of your Box. Once you have your Piqabrick Top delivered, place it on top of the Body, plug it in and start having fun!

REMEMBER! You can totally create your custom Piqabrick Box! What matters are the internal dimension of the box: 14×14 brick units wide and 12 brick units tall. Keep these dimension and you are ready to go! And COLORS DOES NOT MATTER, TOO!

Time to build! 

The board with LEDs
5 LEDs on each side provide the correct illumination for brick identification.

The Camera
The camera is protected by a secure glass.

The Top
The plastic shell fits into your creations.

Personalized Piqabricker brick
Your Piqabrick box comes with your personal unique Piqabricker brick

Piqabrick web dashboard

The Piqabrick web dashboard controls the Piqabrick Box.

• Usable on PC, MAC, smartphone or tablet. 
• No installation required.
• Available on any browser. Brick identification is optimized for Google Chrome. Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge are also supported.

After the identification, you can access your inventory to organize your bricks by ID code and color code. You also get direct links to your favorite marketplaces to buy or sell specific bricks easily and faster than ever before!

Functionalities

• Easy Scan: identify bricks with our plug & play Piqabrick Box. No setup needed! 
• Similarity: Get all similar bricks with a single click
• Inventory: An easy-to-use web dashboard will help you organize your inventory
• Integration: Interface easily with your favorite brick marketplace 
• Rebrick: Know which sets you can build with your bricks
• Appear in: Know the sets where a brick appears in
• Zoom in: Zoom in to catch any detail of your bricks

Crowdsourced project

Piqabrick is indeed a crowdsourcing project, where the members of our community, the Piqabrickers, can contribute by providing new information and photos about bricks, sets and minifigures. It is a project for brick lovers, made by brick lovers.

Under the hood

Piqabrick relies on DART (Direct Acquisition and ReTrieval), our Artificial Intelligence-based proprietary technology, which is a breakthrough in Computer Vision.

DART automatically identifies objects directly accessing images with same content while reducing the costs of AI training.

This means two major advantages:

Prototyping and final release

Piqabrick is the result of years of research and development in computer vision, this is a brief overview of the prototyping prototyping process that allowed us to obtain the final release of Piqabrick

Meet the Piqateam

Behind the Piqabrick Project there are Stefano and Claudio Berti, two tireless and inventive nerds who founded GETCOO, an Italian company specialized in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision for industry and cultural tourism.

What’s their speciality?

Its name is Dart (Direct Acquisition and ReTrieval) and it is a Computer Vision algorithm which identifies objects in images. Dart was initially used in GETCOO Travel project, an app designed to discover art and monuments thanks to the image recognition. Then it was the turn of PIQAPART, a Computer Vision SaaS platform for industry and craftsmanship which identifies items without traditional marking, barcodes or QR codes. And last but not least, Dart is used also in Piqabrick. Want to learn more about GETCOO? Check our profile!

Stefano Berti – GETCOO co-founder & CEO

Stefano is a systems analyst and programmer with 20 years of experience. After the Secondary School Diploma in Industrial Engineering, he worked as system administrator and IT manager in different companies. Over the years, Stefano made the most of his knowledge in some pilot projects, such as RevIMG, an image search engine based on Computer Vision, and Meetapalooza, a social network platform. In 2015, he founded GETCOO with his brother Claudio, Roberta Grasso and Jona Sbarzaglia, an Italian startup specialized in artificial intelligence and computer vision with a focus on industry and tourism, carrying on the RevIMG project.

Claudio Berti – GETCOO co-founder & CTO 

Claudio graduated in 2007 in IT Engineering at the University of Bologna and then, in 2011, got a PhD in Computational Biophysics, developing algorithms to calculate the movement of ions through ion channels. Between 2013 and 2015 he had been a researcher at Rush University Medical Center of Chicago, where he studied ion flow in heart and muscle cells. At the end of 2015, Claudio came back to Italy to join Stefano in their GETCOO project. Today, he develops day by day their DART algorithm.

Jona Sbarzaglia – GETCOO co-founder

Jona is a visual designer passionate about branding, type design and colors. He worked as graphic designer and art director for agencies and then, in 2012, he became freelance. In 2015 he embraced GETCOO cause, which he founded with Claudio, Stefano and Roberta. Today he creates logos, icons, web and app interfaces for all GETCOO products. Yes, he created the Piqabrick Logo, too!

Roberta Grasso – GETCOO co-founder

Roberta is one of the founders of GETCOO. She graduated in Fine Arts (mainly because she’s truly passionate about mosaics) and she has an affinity for marketing and communication. She’s very precious for GETCOO project since she is responsible for administration, social media communication and blog posts for our social fan pages, especially for GETCOO Travel.

As for Berti brothers, she’s been playing LEGO® since she was a child, creating mainly bricks-made mosaics!

As we are passionate about LEGO®, we strongly believe Piqabrick will be the perfect assistant of any brick lover and player. Piqabrick is indeed a crowdsourcing project, where the members of our community, the Piqabrickers, can contribute by providing new information and photos about bricks, sets and minifigures. It is a project for the people, made by the people. What can ignite and boost this project more than crowdfunding?
This crowdfunding campaign will help the Piqabrick project in two different ways:

Reach a large number of brick lovers to create an enthusiast community of Piqabrickers

Raise capital to buy our components at a volume discount and start massive production of the Piqabrick hardware 

Shipping

We are partnering with Fulfillrite. You can see shipping details in every pledge, we will be superfast and reliable! 

Risks & Challenges

Piqabrick is the last (and most fun) application of our proprietary computer vision technology named DART (Direct Acquisition and ReTrieval). DART has been developed in 4 years of hard work and it is successfully applied in the identification of very diverse items: spare parts, tools, monuments, buildings…

In order to initiate this campaign, being able to satisfy the demanding community of brick lovers , we did an extensive testing and prototyping for about 8 months. We are specialized in this kind of solutions, but it is very important for us to be extra sure you feel comfortable with Piqabrick.

The biggest risk we can foresee is the danger of exceeding our very tight and ambitious time schedule to deliver on time and world wide the Piqabrick boxes. But as we only work with local partners and a truly professional network, we are confident that we can really make it on time.

That said, we very well do know that many challenges will emerge on our path. Setbacks can always occur, but we will be sure to communicate to our Kickstarter backers every step of the way!