Tony is a Geek

Well.....I seem to have made "some" progress...of sorts.  I've managed to get the turtlebot3 software running correctly on the robot itself.  I have a Virtual Ubuntu 20.04 machine running ROS2 foxy edition and using all the OOTB stuff it seems to be behaving itself. I have created a map using SLAM and used the Navigator2 to click around and get the turtlebot3 to plot a course and move around avoiding obstacles as well as "new" obstacles, like the cat suddenly appearing in front of it.  It seems to handle it well. ( A bit like a certain "Routing Widget v2.1" ;-) ) However...moving over into the ROS2 coding side of things, I had to go back into refresher-land for a day or two (I really do recall doing all of this back in 2017/2018, the memories are still there!). If I do a direct call from the command-line: ros2 topic pub --once /cmd_vel geometry_msgs/msg/Twist "{linear: {x: 2.0, y: 0.0, z: 0.0}, angular: {x: 1.0, y: 0.0, z: 1.8}}" publisher: b...

 Proper retro-throwback this one.  Some of us may remember the glorious (no they weren't) days of text adventure games. Yes, the days of just having textual descriptions written out before you and a limited set of instructions you could perform, such as >go north and >pick up axe or even >use axe on elf If you had graphics, they were very limited and crude.  I do recall a game from around 1985-ish called: The Heroes of Khan I got stuck for soooooo long before someone else told me, >use tinder on gas (such a potential different meaning today) and I then managed to get a bit further, but then gave up and moved onto other things, like playing Manic Miner. Anyway, what I was meant to be doing was referencing this "new" website that allows you to build and run text adventures all within your web browser - you can now play them anywhere you have a fixed keyboard (as you have to be able to type). It's called https://adventuron.io/   Looks like a nifty, albeit n...

  Check out the article - it's only a 6 minute read, but it's worth it. https://sdsclub.com/21st-century-ai-biggest-achievements/ https://sdsclub.com/21st-century-ai-biggest-achievements/ Summary: GPT-3 – The Language of AI Healthcare and Drug Discovery AI Self-driving cars (driverless car or autonomous car) Virtual assistance, security, and surveillance technologies Chatbots are soooooo 2017/2018 - they've had their time getting the technology and concepts under peoples/companies noses, now we should be striving for more, doing more, stretching our innovations and minds more. Roll on the next 10 years...

 I originally ordered the RPi4 version; however I was contacted by Sparkfun.com to say that was not in stock and there was a min. of 2 weeks lead time due to worldwide delivery delays etc... Initially, I thought, "tch! typical!", then the nice support person asked if I wanted to use an RPI3 version instead, as they had 1 of those in stock and basically the kit is exactly the same, it's just a different RPi. Well....I already have an RPi4 inside the Robot Dog/Cat from Freenove....so, I could just swap that out if I really needed the performance....so, I agreed (with a little discount ;-) ) and well, the TurtleBot3 arrived the next day. Here's some images of me being on conference calls and making the TurtleBot3 on my home/work desk - it was pretty simple/easy - however, my only observation was the lack of clear instructions that should show putting little nuts into the bottom/insert of the PCB board holders, once I figured that out all the PCB boards were then nice and...

 Okay, I have decided to treat myself and have ordered on of these.  It's a TurtleBot3: Yes, I know/appreciate that I've got most of these "bits" in various forms and could probably have hacked them together from junk already in my possession, however, I have booked a week off (in a few weeks time) and after I've done the gardening (assuming it doesn't rain non-stop), I don't want to spend all week trying to get the hardware to work before moving onto doing the useful software. So.... I bought one of these with all the bits already included.  Yes, I still need to bolt it all together, but that's about an hour (tops). Yes....that is a LIDAR on the top.... and yes, I can include an RPi camera in the middle section.  I did order it from robosavvy.com in the UK, however the RPi4 version was out-of-stock with a minimum of 2 weeks lead time... but they did have an RPI3 version available.... well, I have a "spare RPi4" and I checked... it's just...