[HN Gopher] Show HN: Offline sketch to image geneartor in a whit...
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Show HN: Offline sketch to image geneartor in a whiteboard
I'm excited to share my indie product, https://drawing.pics In
this post, I'll share all the technical details behind it. So,
what exactly is DrawingPics? It's an image-to-image and sketch-to-
image generator that runs in a whiteboard, allowing you to draw
your draft directly on the canvas and easily generate the desired
image. How does it work from a technical perspective? TLDR:
Miniconda + Diffusers + Electron + Excalidraw One of the most
important aspects of creating this tool was finding a stable
diffusion locally inference solution. There are many solutions
available, such as https://github.com/leejet/stable-diffusion.cpp
and https://github.com/apple/ml-stable-diffusion. I tested the C++
version, but the inference speed was very slow, and Metal GPU
support still had issues (you can find relevant issues in their
repo). Ultimately, I decided to use python to run it because
PyTorch is mature and MPS support is well-established. And I chose
Miniconda, because it can create a small, isolated Python
environment to run the program. The AI model should run in the
background so that we can continuously produce images while you
draw. We need to find an RPC method to enable communication between
the Python process and Electron's Node.js process. The easiest way
is to run a Python HTTP server, but the memory usage is too high.
We need a more lightweight solution, so I used xmlrpc for memory
efficiency, although there might be better alternatives that I'm
unaware of. The AI inference part is handled by diffusers, which is
great, but I had to apply some custom patches to make it work in
this situation. This can be a bit challenging if you're not
familiar with Python. For the frontend, I initially used a low-
level canvas library and tried to implement a drawing pad from
scratch. However, it had too many details, so I chose a more mature
option: Excalidraw. It's fantastic, with the only shortcoming being
limited API support. Finally, I combined all these technologies in
Electron, ensuring they work smoothly on both the main process and
the renderer process. Ok, Is DrawingPics free to use? 80% of the
project is free to use. I only charge a lifetime license for the
effort I've put in, as I've spent 4 months on it and made numerous
improvements based on user feedback. Currently, only Mac is
supported. Windows support will be added later.
Author : arctanx
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-05-26 07:35 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (drawing.pics)
(TXT) w3m dump (drawing.pics)
| kender wrote:
| Reply
| endofreach wrote:
| "Write reply to this HN post"-prompt fail?
| playingalong wrote:
| Forgotten dollar sign or whatever token is a reference to
| variable.
|
| text vs. $text
|
| And testing in production.
| ffitch wrote:
| I wish someone came up with a rough sketch to neat pretty sketch
| generator, that'd be more practical for whiteboarding.
| arctanx wrote:
| This idea is really cool, I'll try :)
| phlsa wrote:
| Unfortunately, the model download keeps failing for me. That
| being said, it looks promising and I love how simple the setup
| looks.
| arctanx wrote:
| Sorry for that, could you please provide screenshots or
| description in here: https://drawingpics.canny.io/feedback So
| that I can investigate the issue
| acheong08 wrote:
| I'm confused. How is this different from ControlNets?
| arctanx wrote:
| The Controlnets model is too large(maybe 2GB? extra download),
| which means it requires more memory. The line control model
| that I used in drawingpics is about 300MB, which is suitable
| for light users
| xnx wrote:
| I here a lot of people really like Stable Diffusion for Krita
| (https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion). It's pretty easy to
| set up, powerful, local, and totally free.
| arctanx wrote:
| Krita is a great drawing app, but the Krita SD plugin is not
| easy to set up.
|
| I think DrawingPics installation is more friendly, I wrote a
| blog about it https://docs.drawing.pics/index/getting-
| started/drawingpics-...
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Minor typo: "Check You Email" should be "Check Your Email".
| Congrats on launch.
| playingalong wrote:
| The pricing link in hamburger doesn't open for me.
|
| Chrome Android
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