Category: Uncategorized

• Fat Head’s – Sunshine Daydream – loves it, method and crisp
• Airway – Jumbo Juice – good and drinkable, I’d expect more citrus with that name
• Old Schoolhouse – Rule Breaker #8 – a little too funky for me

I did work night. Not on what I wrote about in pt 6, but it was work 

I’ve started running through the tutorials. Yeah! Had to leave the website, go to Google, to get a link -to the same website- to find the tutorials for python. Boo. Wrote (one of?) My first python script(s). Yeah! Second one wouldn’t work. Boo. Found a solution after 20 minutes of searching. Yeah! It was on the same website where I found instructions geared entirely for throwing opencv on a Pi. Boo.

So I guess I will start documenting the process, as that’s just dumb.

Or how I got back to basics.

Or it should be me getting back to basics. What is the goal. What is the purpose. What is the iterative design criteria.

At this stage I want a tool around on hardwood thing. It needs to not got things. It needs to push dirt around.

This is to say, tonight I should mount the Raspberry Pi on it,   spin some tires, get some accelerometer and distance sensor data. 

I should also run through a tutorial on opencv.org. Or two.  Definitely start doing the tutorials.

opencv.org

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This seemed like a really lazy ready to get a picture to the Pi for staying to do image recognition. I assume that Reese is about the worst case scenario ever for this.

I swapped the SD cards between the two Pi’s. Since then I’ve been installing the stuff I need. I now have X and Pixel. I put on Python and some utilities. I added Pingus, because reasons. I’ve downloaded everything I need to get OpenCVing. Everything except finished compiling. Dear Lord, this is taking my soul.

Oh well, make is showing 68%, and while I’m sure those are rough numbers,  at least it’s some progress. Me thinks I should have just cross compiled. I think on the long term, I’m doing the right thing, but still, it’s taking forever. Now if I wanted efficiency, I’d be compiling all of the above on my desktop as well  so I could get done practice on the coding end.

I should be doing that, shouldn’t I. It will also give me a chance to poke at the different IDEs out there. While I used to do everything in notepad, I’ve now gotten much more wanting a clean editor. IDEs aren’t really necessary for me, at least at this point, but having syntax highlighting is just so nice. It feels lazy, but having my tabs handled cleanly, having parenthesis matching, having code completion… it’s lazy. But lazy feels so nice.

What about making a quick serial interface with one of the Things. I could then focus on getting…

No. Not really useful. What I should do though is add a web powered emergency stop. I could bust that out with Node.js in a few minutes. That might be important.

I did some more work. I found my second Pi 3, found (in literally the last place I could think of) my SD card to USB adapter, and then put on a small copy of Raspbian.  With only a minimal amount of dicking around, I get ssh’d in, and I’m in business. For future efforts, I need to find a replacement for ssh. I think I should setup either Static IP address for the home or something. Really, my home network is an effort in laziness, and it shows. I’m also thinking I might replace the OS for the Pi-Top, because I just really don’t like that flavor. In part I think it encourages me to be more inefficient.

Now then, it wasn’t all roses. First of all, and I was thinking this yesterday but forgot it until I want to bed last night, I should start documenting these projects like tutorials for others. While I assume my readership will always be slight, I need to be able to remind myself of what I did and why. Or… I could start a project on Hackaday’s project database. Maintain change logs and stuff. I should think about that.

That being said, there was a more real problem. I got ssh’d into the Pi. I opened a USB serial port to the RedBoard,  and balls. The best I got was a flashing status LED when sending data and a hung screen connection that received a line of text. I’ve got to nail that down. I think I’ll have to re-look at my serial settings, and maybe see if it’s not sending a newline maybe?

Last night I downloaded a fresh copy of the Arduino IDE, as I think I corrupted the old install by going who knows what. Fired it up, grabbed the Sparkfun Redbot libraries, and got it blinking. I sent over a test of the wheels and nothing. Batteries must be dead, so I replaced the batteries. Nothing. Now this has been kicking down in the Den for quite a while now, but everything looks fine. Oh, but I did have the motor disable switch flipped. So that works now. Then, right before the kingdom of Nod attacked, I loaded the serial command setup and spun some tires.

So tonight, I should focus on the Raspberry Pi end, I’ll grab the one not in the Pi-Top,  and start loading softwa… nope. Tonight I’ll change the default user and password. Security! Then get an outbound serial terminal for driving the RedBot. Then I’ll look at chopping out the excess software and putting on what I need. Maybe I should look for an OpenCV crash course online.

Grabbed that guy it of the scrap pile the other day. I think it’s time to make him earn his keep. First, get manually driving the wheels. Then get a RPi dying the wheels. Then add OpenCV to the RPi.

Well that’s a start at least.

And realized I have a problem with trying to multiplex the moisture sensors. Mainly, optimally you inert the current regularly to prevent electroplating them. The problem is trying to figure out how to multiplex them and invert the currents, seeing as how the traditional way to multiplex them is to use diodes. I’m thinking of an idea, but it might be more terrible than it’s worth.

I could try to find done cheap I2C or SPI chip things though. That’d be engineering right there. Like a boss.