Posts

Turtlebot3 reborn

-
Image
I finally found the TurtleBot3 robot!  It was in a box, under a desk, hidden away.  I thought I'd lost it. Turns out I bought this a LOT longer ago that I remember: https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2021/10/turtlebot3-arrived-and-well-i-couldnt.html https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2021/10/turtlebot3-status-update.html It turns out that when I installed and set this all up before, the world has moved on quite significantly and the versions of everything have moved on. So I did what anyone would do... I wiped the SD-Card and started the installation again from scratch. What it did need was the ability to install all the graphical front-end software onto a "decent" laptop - so I repurposed the IBM ThinkPad as per the instructions and then proceeded to basically follow the instructions for installing onto the device itself. PC install instructions :  https://emanual.robotis.com/docs/en/platform/turtlebot3/quick-start/#pc-setup Raspberry Pi installation instructions :  ht...
Post a Comment
Read more

Setting up GitLab within Docker

-
Image
I'll be honest, I've been putting this off for quite some time & maybe that's been a good thing? Why would that be a statement to make? Well, because the complexity is now removed. not 100% but mostly. What am I on about?  Well, setting up a GitLab repository LOCALLY on your own machine / environment so you can do your own offline source control. Y'know, there are times you just don't want your code being pushed out to GitHub, even if you've made the repo's private & paid money, it still doesn't stop the owners (Micro$oft) from using your content / code to train their Machine Learning* models against your code - that will eventually put you out of a job as id1ots think that auto-generated code from Machine Learning* models is so good it will do that.  It won't, however, I don't particularly want to accelerate that level of dumb thinking. Answer = install GitHub  GitLab locally yourself. https://docs.gitlab.com/install/docker/ $ docker pul...
Post a Comment
Read more

Aqara sensors & node-RED

-
Image
It turns out, like usual, I bought things in the past that I was going to use for something, either it didn't happen, it didn't work as I wanted or I just forgot / didn't have time. This weekend, I noticed that I had a sonoff usb dongle that looked quite funky - I vaguely remember buying it to see if I could "sniff" the new electricity / gas "smart meter" that had been fitted.   I still have issues about the BS that relates to the companies referring to them as "smart", there is nothing smart there at all, it is just micro-managing the monitoring of the household usage, looking for patterns, identifying your electrical items, determining what you have and how to make the most amount of money out of you - so, yes, in the sense of "smart" it is for the company, not for you the consumer. Anyway, I was wondering, I need to do something with a vibration sensor with node-RED, so I thought, hey, let's see what is available for sale that ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Node-RED is coming of age

-
Image
I've been using Node-RED for over a decade now ( here's a post to "prove it"), I've used it personally on Raspberry Pi devices, on robotic platforms, I've used it in Enterprise grade level clients across Europe & Africa to manage smart buildings, improve process flows & distribute / parse data to where it needs to be to make informed decisions.  I even had it running on a prototype BMW i8 in Munich at one point, talking to an AI tool :-D A couple of years back I even used Node-RED hooked up to a 1979 Atari 800XL to connect to the internet / LLMs , just for fun - but it did show just how powerful, quick & simple it was to get that all important "integration" working from an idea into a proof-of-concept to a demonstration. I often hear the sentence, "oh, but node-RED is not scalable. It is not able to handle 50,000 messages a second processing, etc..etc..".  Well, as I inform these ignorant people, "do we need to?".  th...
Post a Comment
Read more