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Welcome to my world of Octopuses*

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I decided to get a tattoo.  Here is what the final result will look like: Here is what it looks like today: Next Friday, I'll have the "blue colouring" overlaid, so will provide an updated image. What has the got to do with anything?  A little while back I was experimenting with SDR  (Software Defined Radio) USB sticks, antenna's, Raspberry Pis, UBuntu laptops and tracking planes and ships (ADB-S and AIS data) I recently started working with some software from octo.us  : just replace the . with a p & you see the serendipity of the universe! CXEdge is of special interest ;-) Then, earlier this week I was having a discussion about the work I did with the SDRs a year ago and how some other people/companies are just about catching up..... Then today I was introduced to this little device:   CHECKOUT the WEBSITE for MORE INFO HERE They also have a TAK plugin that integrates nicely with Node-Red too:  https://github.com/canaryradio/Kraken-to-TAK Now, just need to justi
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Stop pi$$ing around and just use this for all your LLM stuff

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Glad I got your attention. Right, I'm assuming you know what LLM is.  I assume you know what RAG is. I assume you know what an AI Agent is. I'm also assuming you're fed up being told that you need to code a solution by hand using Python, Langchain etc... to achieve this, when all you want to do is just use the technology and not have to hand crank every piece of the solution. Well, fear no more.  AnythingLLM is here to save the day.   VISIT the OFFICIAL WEBSITE HERE btw - I have no affiliation with this app or people, I just think it ticks a LOT of boxes, it is simple, efficient & effective - and had I been allowed to continue with the path that I was on 18months ago, I would have made the same thing (about a year ago), but hey-ho, that is not my purpose - but it does mean I appreciate what they've done. What's all the fuss about? Okay, you can install this locally, on your Linux laptop, if you must, your Mac and if you are a real knucklehead, a Windows machine
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Rotary phone, RPi5, STT & Ollama for an offline quirky assistant with TTS output - part 3

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As shown HERE (Part 1) & HERE (Part 2), I've been fiddling around with an old rotary phone, adding some switches and servo and hooking it up to a Raspberry Pi 5 in order to do some Speech to Text processing, some local / offline LLM processing and some Text to Speech output. Well, I've been faffing around with this on & off for a short while and I've now finally got the hardware & the software doing what it needs to do.  It is version 1.0, as in, it is in Python, however I do have it all setup to be able to drop down to C coding and see if that actually makes things faster / more efficient etc.. So, what was the plan? I wanted to take an old rotary phone, attempt to leave the externals as standard as possible, but make it so that a person can pick up the handset, dial a number, "ask a question", put the phone handset back down and then have the phone ring when an answer is ready, the person picks the handset back up and the answer is spoken to the pe
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RPi 5 & AI Kit (teaser)

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In a good & bad way, I've been somewhat distracted & busy with work/work - when that happens all my toy playing experiments go on hold. Whilst I'm far from having time to play again, I'm just dropping this here as a mental reminder for myself & as a teaser that this is sitting on my desk as a "NEXT" item to investigate. You can purchase it HERE Updates to follow.
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Rotary phone, RPi5, STT & Ollama for an offline quirky assistant with TTS output - part 2

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Okay, following on from the success of Part 1 (okay, it was only about 8 hours ago, but y'know) I ventured into the Hardware side of things, looking at getting the software to interact with the hardware.  Time to get the screwdrivers out. As mentioned, I thought I was going to use Node-Red.  I burnt even more time trying to get Node-Red GPIO nodes to work.  Turns out that there are "issues" with RPi 5, Python and the GPIO access.  It took me far too long going around in circles to accept this.  I'll have a chat with DCJ when he's back from holiday in July. So, what did I do?  I went back to the layer underneath.  Yep, I did it people, I dropped into using Python.  Actually, I noticed that the node-red node was just dropping down to using Python anyway, so I was just removing the layer that was giving me issues. Here's the Node-Red error I was getting: It's odd as I can run that command not a problem and I followed all the instructions for the node about gr
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