Tony is a Geek

A little while back - okay, nearly a year ago: https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2024/01/meconsole-weconsole-uconsole.html I decided to purchase a uConsole device.  I selected to have a 4G internal adapter inside, but for the love of god, I tried everything to get the b*s*d thing to work, I even changed the internal firmware - maybe it was the fact I was using giffgaff? I don't know.  Anyway, I then got some "bluepoints" (some people will know what that means!) and well, I then cashed them in for a £50 Amazon card. Next thing you know, I have 2 x 4G USB dongles coming my way :-D Why two, Tony?  Well, y'know, I either break one, I take one apart, I destroy one or one never does what it says, yadeyadaya... After having such fun getting the UGV Rover working the past few days , I finally got around to having a go with setting up the 4G USB dongles. Both devices came with 02 sim cards from sims4home.co.uk with a discount code - I actually use this in my campervan, works a...

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...

Last year it was about Meshtastic and LoRa devices running on Heltec v3 devices. This year, it's all about the Rectum[sic] :  https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum So, what is it? Well, it's an alternative protocol for sending low-bandwidth data over RF (radio frequencies).  "so what?" Well, today you are spoilt by using 4G/5G (3G was turned off recently) where you have high bandwidth available to send voice, images and text information. What if you don't have access to the cell-towers? what if someone switches it off, for whatever reason. Well, that was what Meshtastic was going to help with & it's mighty fine at doing that - I'm suggesting that you run both these options in parallel.  "Why?" Well, they serve slightly different purposes. Meshtastic is raw, the minimum, nothing fancy.  It is a black screen with green text & lines.  It communicates over low-bandwidth and the battery life is long because of this. Reticulum, see, I have tro...

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...

Tentacles get into code! Scratch is an amazing learning resource but it struggles on mobile devices.  So, say hello to OctoStudio! Designed on the back of requests from educators, it's aimed at phones and tablets, where children don't have access to laptops or desktop computers, but do have access to mobile devices. Learn more at  https://octostudio.org/en/ Android and Apple / iPad system requirements: and they have a You Tube channel with a load of examples / tutorials too: If you know someone who is between 7 - 12 (or even older to be fair! I might give it a go!) and lives on their mobile device - how about getting them to be a game creator! it's like going back to the 1980s, but with newer technology - I wonder what creative things will get made?!

Because I so love repeating myself - I really don't, trust me, but I tend to end up doing that - a lot! I've decided to "start again" with the Waveshare UGV Rover. "why?" because, that's why.  well, I've been around the houses with this thing so many times that I've lost track of how to reproduce the state of where I'm at & how to recreate.  Also, for some odd reason I managed to break the installation that I had in place and I couldn't get any imagery from the camera. hmmm... not sure what I broke, or if indeed it was actually me & not an update? Anyway, so here I am again, going back through a "start from scratch" install & setup.  This time I thought, "y'know, I'm gonna f**k this up a few times, I best document the steps so I can run through it faster the next 5 times I do this" :-) First step.  Get the waveshare .img file - that saves LOADS of time, basically it is Raspberry Pi 5 OS (Bookworm) w...