Handwritten Note Search — Innovation Engine

What was built

Watches for new handwritten notes synced from the TCL tablet, runs OCR via tesseract, and saves searchable .txt files alongside them. Lets you grep your handwritten notes from the terminal — bridging the analog-digital gap your tablet workflow currently has.

Connects

tablet-sync-apiTCL tablet handwritten notesdesktop CLI search

How it works

Create ~/services/note-ocr/ocr-watch.sh (~60 lines). Uses inotifywait on ~/Tablet/ (or polls the tablet-sync API's change endpoint) for new .png/.jpg files in handwritten note directories. Runs `tesseract --oem 3 --psm 6` to produce .txt sidecars. Stores an index at ~/Tablet/.ocr-index.json mapping filename→extracted text→timestamp. Add a companion `note-search` script in ~/bin/ that greps the index: `note-search 'meeting budget'` returns matching note filenames with context snippets. Install tesseract via `sudo apt install tesseract-ocr`. Register as systemd user service or add to crontab every 5 minutes. Connects to existing tablet-sync-api change tracking to only process newly synced files, avoiding re-OCR of old notes.

Build status

Needs Review

Build timed out after 5 minutes

Context

Active Projects

data, innovation-engine, bys-website, .claude, doc-markup-app