Tony is a Geek

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...

Okay, so after wasting a LOT of time going around in circles? ( Which does make me wonder how far & how not-far (!far), we've actually come in the IT Industry, we seemed to have peaked in the mid/late 1990s/early 2000s & then seemed to have gotten stuck & repeated ourselves and gone in a downward spiral - wow, I really do sound like a Gen-X-er! which I am, so get over it )  I often confess I'm no genius, I just keep trying different positions to put the square block into the circle hole repeatedly, until I either wear down the sides of the square or I make the circle more square - such is life :-) What has this got to do with ROS2.  Well, I thought this was going to be a 10minute job, super simple & I could move onto the "good stuff" and do something useful with my time.  Over the years, I have learnt that I tend to spend the time between xmas & new year just doing "installs & setups", I rarely actually get to the point where I "...

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...