Tony is a Geek

...and that is not THIS type of Lorra Lorra laughs : Cyla Black although, my laughs were more tears of woe and then tears of joy-ish What is LoRa and why is it spelt that way? well, you could DuckDuckGo and search for it, however, simple description: "Lo-ng Ra-nge comms" . [UPDATE: okay, I'll answer the question, "why bother? why not just use WiFi?" - that is such a non-Gen X question.  Right. WiFi sucks a LOT of power, I mean a LOT.  It also requires an AP (access point), one device will have to be a gateway router for one device to connect to the other... and also, well, the "LoRa" name says it all... can you move your laptop outside your house, walk down the street, keep walking, keep walking some more and still get a signal to that WiFi AP? no. no you cannot. Ah, ha, then you'll attempt to be smart and say, "4G" or "5G", well, yes, but that needs another device, such as your phone to be required, then you have to connect yo...

 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...

I wrote another PAGE to extend the original earlier POST as I received my Raspberry Pi 4 and decided to set it up and compare it to the Rock Pi X and RPi 3+ device. Well....that was an interesting exercise! CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT IT IN MORE DEPTH Old creepy eyes here, does do the job with an RPI 4 device... but not as outstandingly well as I had expected.   To see the RPi4 performance, check out the PAGE HERE . Well, it seems to be working okay...... CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT IT IN MORE DEPTH

most certainly not a "new" idea, but I eventually got around to putting this together: https://learn.adafruit.com/mini-raspberry-pi-handheld-notebook-palmtop?view=all I 3D printed out the parts, takes about 6-8hours in total.  I already had one of these bluetooth keyboards knocking around from way-back-when, it's kinda cool as it has a little mouse pad on the right hand side and if you set up the Pi properly, it picks it up on boot-up and "just works". I have a 3.5" touchscreen and an RPi3, albeit not the same screen as shown in the article, (but I'll come back to that later).  I already had a battery power battery from another project that didn't go anywhere, so it seemed like a good idea to throw all these parts together and make this. The one gotcha I currently have is related to the hinge screws/nut things, I don't have what is needed - I've gone through every "box of bits" I have - what I did find was 2 pop-rivets ...

As explained here:   http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/internal/courses/int-robot/2015/notes/concepts.php ROS is a  message-passing  framework which allows you to create fully-fledged robotic systems quickly and easily. Rather than writing a single, large program to control the robot, we run a number of smaller, process-specific programs ( e.g. to analyse images from a camera ) and run them side-by-side, passing messages between them to share data and other variables. The core component in ROS is called a Node: Each Node performs a particular process, such as processing sensor data or controlling a laser scanner. You can think of them as code modules. However, rather than calling a Java method to get the robot to do something, we  publish messages . Messages are published on topics , which are like separate channels.  Nodes subscribe  to these topics: Whilst one Node publishes messages on a certain topic ( for example, robot movement commands ...