Tony is a Geek

 Wow! just wow. I was using this sort of kit about 2 years ago for the nice sum of around £2,500 You can now get it between £350-£650 (depending on where you buy it from), or $249 (yeah, I'll let you work out that conversation rate chaos?!?!) What does it do? It is a wow! show-stopper.  CHECK IT OUT CHECK IT OUT MORE HERE: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/jetson-orin/nano-super-developer-kit/ Okay, I'll stop teasing & show you the SPECs: YES, you read that right, 1024 CUDA cores.... 1024.... in something that small.  Now, it starts to become something useful?!?! CHECK OUT the official 1-pager of info: https://nvdam.widen.net/s/zkfqjmtds2/jetson-orin-datasheet-nano-developer-kit-3575392-r2 I'd love to order one.  However, life unfortunately gets in the way, so I have to stick with paying bills first & such innovative advancements have to pass me by (for now). OKAY, so after checking this out - a DIRECT sale, I was a little surp...

Yep, I ordered it back in January 2024, it finally arrived...just before December 2024.  Apparently the 10-month delay wasn't a joke, it really does take that long.  Was it worth the wait? Yeah, I reckon so. The 32Gb SDCard that came with the device, I just stuck it into the device - it was Debian 11 Bullseye for Raspberry Pi 4.  It worked okay, for a day or so. I installed [node-red], it worked well, I downloaded [world-map] and got some markers appearing, it seemed to perform well.  I then started to think how I want to set this device up to use it.  I wanted [Arduino] too. That 4G adaptor - how do you get it to work? (using the Debian Bullseye install) Well, after putting in a SIM card, the instructions in this article worked a treat: https://github-wiki-see.page/m/clockworkpi/uConsole/wiki/How-to-use-the-4G-extension To summarise: $ uconsole--4g-cm4 enable This outputs that it is detecting the adaptor and then it says something like "success". Then what? Wel...

https://github.com/danielmiessler/fabric "Fabric is an open-source framework for augmenting humans using AI. It provides a modular framework for solving specific problems using a crowdsourced set of AI prompts that can be used anywhere." "So what?" Well, if you've gone beyond the "hey, I can setup and access an LLM and now I'm a genius" phase, you will have hit the valley of disillusionment (is that even a word?), decided that LLMs are crap, attempted to do "stuff" with them & then mentally accepted that they are not smart at all, it's all an illusion to "appear to be intelligent", but really it's just word pattern matching and spewing out garbage in response to your questions, or just plain bollox. Then you thought, "hmmm... I'm going to write myself some prompts, that'll make life better", then you wrote about 5 very long and convoluted one's that you think are great & will be used for pre...

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...

Well, it's been a while since my last post.  Have I been up to anything technical? Yes & No. I've returned to the world of campervans! My previous motorhome (Kontiki 635) was stolen back at the end of April 2024 :-(  After a reasonably painless insurance claim process & lots of UK Police time, the motorhome was "found", however, it had been crashed / trashed - so was a write-off. I wasn't looking for another one, however, I then just happened to stumble upon a 2008 VW Crafter Campervan that ticked a LOT of boxes.  It was a professional conversion, it had a full size shower and a proper thetford cartridge toilet.  It had a king-size bed.  It has central heating - yes, the previous one had central heating, but that was a £65k van, this one was £16k! It has a solar panel, leisure battery and all connected up & working okay. It has a great layout inside, someone previously really thought about the design.  I'm the 4th owner and it's done 145k mile...

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 ne...