Tony is a Geek

Okay, whilst mental hopping between a few things, I decided to "go back to basics" and remove the Docker and ROS2 aspects out of the equation. Why couldn't I go back to the "bare metal" on the Raspberry Pi 5? and just use Python (yes, I know, I know) to read and write to the /dev/ ports. To save the UGV driving off the foot stool, I propped it up on some old books that were propped against a wall.  This free's the wheels up so they can move without driving off the top! As it's a SUNDAY, I'm having a relaxed day, as you can tell! I found quite a few lines of code on the good old inter-webs & of course, it all works "perfectly fine" for everyone else, of course it does. sigh. It's just me, then is it?  I did wonder about this & I tried to find real videos / photo's / website that show the LiDAR actually working with the UGV, y'know what, yep - couldn't find anything.  Hmmm.... I started to scratch my beard at this poin...

Continuing my ongoing quest to see if I can get anything from ROS2 and a small Lidar device ( I just found a YT video of a very young person, maybe 12? that, of course, got this working using Rviz2 in about 8minutes, pfhh... guess my technical days are numbered?! ) However, not to be deterred, I am choosing to do this the "hard way", ie. I want to see RAW data, I want to see the values being spat out of the Lidar, I want to see the numbers - I then want to record that or process it on the fly - yes, I know that RViz2 will do that, but I want to be able to use it for some autonomous sensor usage, ie. make the thing self-drive & navigate.  Maybe I should search YT to follow another 12year old that has already done that already? Anyway, I suppose it's a bit like sitting on a couch in your socks & pants, eating biscuits, watching p0rn on the TV, saying, "yeah, I can do that", "that's easy, anyone can do it" - but IRL, it's somewhat more com...

A UGV Rover 6-wheeled robot with Raspberry Pi5, awesome camera (pan & tilt / stabilisation) and a LiDar - what's not to like?  Well, it's open-source too. However, it comes with a bit of an odd setup, it is running a Raspberry Pi 5 board, but to control the device itself it's also running an ESP32 board that controls all the components. OOTB the setup is "okay", it's a web-browser based access to all the bits you need, it even has the concept of a jupyter notebook style Python setup that allows you to control / access all the features.  Although, this soon becomes a bit limiting. I hooked up a mini-HDMI to the Raspberry Pi 5 and it booked to Bookworm (12, I believe), which allowed me to then install things natively, I installed YOLO and got some really good camera / vision analysis going on. However, I then had the addition of the LiDar D500 attachment .   Now, this is where the "fun" started.  The lidar component came with links to a Windows .e...

 Now, here's a thing of joy that won't break the bank.... Well....£245 isn't "cheap", but it's about 10 times cheaper than they were when I last looked! https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1461.html I wonder if I could stick it on the roof of my 1959 Austin A35?..... now that could be interesting.... Well, these people have a slightly more expensive LIDAR and stuck it on top of a 3D Printed (?) vehicle - again, it's all about the software behind the hardware:  https://nuro.ai/product