secondsuitor

Finished installing a clean(er) build of opencv. It works directly from the command line, with no virtual environment. By must standards this isn’t ideal, but it’s a good start of I’m trying to keep everything as light as possible. I only add the (er) as I didn’t compile anything myself which means that everything I grabbed should be suspect. I’m not super worries though because reasons.

Tomorrow I have other things to be doing while the day is lit, so I’ll not be going full arm for a bit. Hopefully the vision stuff itself will get going relatively fast. I also didn’t get a book today (almost went to a bookstore but stuff) though I’m back to the nay side of the wall anyway. A book may or may not happen eventually.

Tomorrow I’m switching out two outlets, mounting some solar lights and cutting down a played tree. We’ll see how that all works seeing as how I still have the world’s stupidest injury. At least the Wif finally started agreeing with me about what my injury is.

Screw this. I’m installing python and opencv by hand. Is not that the virtual environment want working. It’s that it was working to make me angry. This is a symptom of my being irrational I know.

Well now that’s off my chest, let’s get down to brass kinematics. What’s my goal? A general people arm that can reliably (within reason) move items around the Den. I should rename the Den of Inequity. Den of… I don’t know. I’ll find something. Back to the arm. The base software will be running on a Raspberry Pi 3, because I have a couple that should do the things. The rain why I’ll initially go with that versus the BeagleBone is the built in WiFi will help with install development repositioning (fewer cables), though at a later point I might consider switching because the PRUs of the BeagleBone would probably make for some sweet smooth movement. I’ll be starting with servos to avoid having to deal with stepper motor drivers right out of the gate, though again this will probably change as the arm expand on scope and size. I’m still debating on the initial arm type. I’m almost thinking a SCARA arm for the reduced force needed as the fight against gravity isn’t forced, pardon the out, on every single motor. Obviously whenever people think arm though they’re thinking of something like the arms they always show in movies, it’s just they’re not that efficient. Decisions suck. Right. SCARA will be first, and I’ll go from there.

Monday or so, because of irrational reasons, I have a parts showing up. That would be a gripper assembly, wire assortment, as I do need to be better about colour coding my wires, and a stack of motors of various types. The goal is that I should be able to recognize a beer bottle cap, its average colour as well as it’s two most prevalent colours and the penance there of. Add on top of that it’s orientation to the viewer.

This will be in the service of creating a mosaic of beer bottle caps. I’ll probably need to think about a jig, for the first iteration, but soon enough a good state would be the arm picking up a cap from a bucket, while in any position, assisting it to see the colors, am and then planning the cap appropriately.

So I got pycharm going; I have a virtual environment from anaconda; I got output to output. Tomorrow I’ll start digging into finding a resource I like for actual learning. I think I might see if the Wif wants to go to Ada to look for book(s). It’s always a difficult choice. I could find tutorials online and deal with what’s a crapshoot of (often contradictory) information. I could get a book that’s already outdated. Neither option is phenomenal. The nice thing about a book is I can read it anywhere, and if any one thing is too new to have made it into the book, than it’s probably something I don’t need to have be in my base toolbox.

I decided today was going to be when I’d bet to work.

I forgot that python package managers (conda in this case, pip when I was doing this on my pi-top) make everything so much simpler than compiling libraries for C. Now I know it’s just me, but I think I prefer the old fashioned download a library, make config, download a library, make config, etc. dance. It was a cleaner. It also took forever and random guesses somedays, but it wasn’t trying too hard to keep you from having to get down in the bushes.

I figure by the time I go through all the tutorials on how to install some bleeding edge (or at least the current version) python and opencv, I’ll be ready to gouge out my eyes at which point having something to do the looking for me will be an incredible boon.

I also decided on this vacation to only drink afternoon, which this experience isn’t helping with one bit.

It’s not that I’m against package managers, and it’s not that I’m against running various code versions (though I actually am)… It’s that if you’re going to have a package manager that is there entirely to maintain multiple packages of different versions of the same thing (the equivalent compiling to whatever god forsaken older library actually works I assume) than have a dependency tree (speaking of drinking).

• I install the manager.
• I start a wrapper.
• I choose a version of python.
• I choose other packages of whatever with the version number next to them.
• As options get chosen for version numbers it checks for compatibility, greying out options that don’t work.
• Have a final check and done.

I don’t think this is too much to ask for. Or maybe I should just get used to the inevitable advance of technology forcing me into compliance. Or I could just start doing things the hard way…

Look to get a full breakdown of pitchers vs. batters, add in a column for the batter’s height (strike box).

Discuss.

So it likes to end paragraphs whenever there is an <h3> tag. This of course is a bunch of bun…

What? I learned something new today. H tags can’t go inside a paragraph. Woah…

Right. I now have while text blocks popping in. I dropped the text I want into a <div> because I could then have section headings be formatted as something a bit more specific than bold. Really I should have a tag with a custom class, but it’s 10pm, and I haven’t had the desire to do HTML by hand in quite a few years. It’s the curse of all these tools. Writing clean markup is something that hasn’t been on my mind.

The text is handled in HTML files for having preformatted text that drops in. I need to take a look at that section of the walk-thru again, as I’m bungling something. I also really need to look into JavaScript’s ins and outs. Stuff like how to do switches, string formatting, and having and manipulating the date.

As a plus note, everything I learn about JavaScript will carry over to anything I do with node.js. As a minute note, if I decide to rebuild my website on node.js I’m going to have to change my host of the last 15 or so years.

At work I’m doing a lot more stuff. Which means that now is the time that I kinda need to fill out my dance card of skills – at least a bit more.

Yesterday I threw on the demo of Planet Press, and I’ve been going through the learning examples. It’s a monster of an interface when I’m coming from InDesign and SmartStream, but it makes sense in a way. Since it, and the majority of it’s competition, are built on top of XML, complaining about it’s page layout is a bit of a mistake. Rather than the InDesign pages and layers you have a lot more of master elements with streamed in sections of content. This is nice for half the things I do, but it looks to be ugly as f-bomb for one off jobs. A lot of this is me visualizing how the jobs we have can be built.

Things to do:

• Multiple backgrounds
• Find my JavaScript Cookbook
• Look into error checking for a given data file (because this is never an issue)
• Build a workflow
• Automate the workflow

Should I build a holiday letter? It’s be a good trial run. I could have a list of addresses and interests. If a given person likes cats, they get the full cat stuff, otherwise they only get a blurb. On the PostScript I could add a custom URL to change how they get their holiday letter. I should also think about using whitespace as well as sending out the letter as an email.

To the prep cave!

My website went down for a few days as a result of a jacked up .htaccess file. At some point I should try to dig into why it went South. On the other hand, it led me to seeing might be able to break free of PHP and switch over to node.js for the server without changing hosts, which might be fun. Since this is low on content and traffic it really doesn’t matter too much on which tech it’s built in top of, but for future purposes (data logging and visualization) it could be hella fun.

I’ll have to look into this as my poor bust arm slowly heals.