secondsuitor

I’ve got the in-laws coming in less than a month, so it’s inmate proofing the house time. While I’m sure this sounds terrible, it’s just the easiest way I have to visualize what I need to do, and it gives me a timeframe. A shot clock.

• Clear space for indoor gardening
• Light rig therefore
• Decommision the upstairs cat box
• Mount the cat tree to the wall
• Organize my junk piles downstairs
• Hang my daily wearing clothes downstairs
• Put all my books away
• Vacuum vacuum vacuum
• Hot water service
• Verify operation of ac, and build a better drip pan
• Putty the mid bathroom screw holes
• Clean all drains

So this seems reasonable. I just need to start today, and work an hour a day. Plus or minus.

I hunted down my ir rangefinder. I quickly realized that I had writes coming off, rather than angering handy for plugging into stuff.  Now, going into the Redbot driver board, I’d need a three wire female connector. After more hinting I found some tall headers, so I chopped the positions.  Then, I yanked the pins,  shoved my freshly stripped wires in, and gave it a shot. I got dice, so it’s time to fix this in place.

Header, check. Rangefinder, check. Shrink tube (or whatever it’s called), check. Zippo, check. Light fluid. Crickets.

So tomorrow I’m doing assembly. The cost value is that as I typed this, I realized I should just hot glue it any way. 

Still going to do shrink tube.

And at first I’m thinking I need to find a lot of cat pictures (easy, internet) and use those for building a whatever it is cascade.The thing is though, I need to identify one if two cats, not a dog, a different cat, whatever. So really what I should do is get the rover roving,  spring me pictures, and I’ll start cataloging them. I’ll then take these pictures to use for building the positive and negative results folders for whatever. Now to think about how to focus on guiding stiff rather than naming what I found.

…a lot of cat pictures.

So the first set of tutorials I was working with have me some annoyance. I don’t pay nice when I follow the tutorial, where guy is trying to sell his books, and then I have to do a search to get back to where I was to find out what was wrong in the original tutorial.

The second tutorial sourceseems to alternate between Python 2 and 3. Also there send to be some disconnects on how someone would choke the tutorials to begin with.

Now I’m on tutorial source numero trés. I’m liking them except I’m at an impasse again.

So I have a couple goals here with Mustachio…

• Sweep the floors
• Locate cat toys
• Corral slippers
• Track the kittehs
• Other

This works out to be sure a bit. One issue is that Reese’s kitty face doesn’t trigger with the built in CV functions. This means I need to build my own trainer. This is also a lot of work for a little Pi, so I should off load the work. So I need to run across on the desktop, that takes pictures from the rover,  processes them, and hands them back to the rover to act upon. I do want the operation decisions done on the rover itself. Passing the pictures back and forth should be easy as N-O-D-E that spells moon. The trick is I need to get the trainer going, and that’s not playing nice. I think tomorrow I’ll do the whole setup a  python virtualenv thing. That kind of did gives me a sad, but hopefully it’ll do the trick.

• 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.