The April Update

Posted on by burf2000

Well, I hope everyone had a lovely April, it always goes fast for me because my birthday, my dad’s birthday, and a few friends’ birthdays are all in April. I also went on a short holiday away with my Father. As you can imagine, this does mean that April was a bit quiet on the Robot front. I know, I keep saying excuses for why things are not happening, this is making me think something needs to be adjusted.

Governor Duties

One of the Wednesdays (6 hours of school visits) was completely wiped out by governor duties. This can not become a regular thing, I am now up-to-date with training and so the workload should reduce.

Anet 3D Printer

So, I have an Anet ET5 3D printer which has worked a dream however it did have a small electrical issue that burnt out a connection. This has been fixed 🙂

Caddy Van
So the van is to replace the Micra as a self-driving project, this hasn’t really started yet as I needed the Jeep to be fixed for my father. That has now passed and I have the green light on the van.

Mobility Scooter

Before I hack the van apart, I plan to try and get the mobility scooter to drive itself. I did manage to get a bit of work started on this, I have fixed a Servo to the steering and am working on a way to drive the motion forward and backward, which is controlled via a potentiometer. If you remember I bought a digital one to try and hack into this. Saldly that died and I am going back to using a servo to manually control the potentiometer. Seems it’s just a 5k pot and the center is neutral in motion.

Yamaha EC-03 Electric moped

Well, while on holiday I invested in some battery packs (48v lithium) and it seems these can replace the battery pack on the EC-03. Now of course the range will not be as good but its a start and a cheap one at that.

The Electric Motorbike Project

So I did make some progress on this also, I have completely removed the engine from the bike, which was done on my company’s wellness day :). I found it super interesting to remove an engine.

Before:

I am now looking to buy an electric motor for it. It’s going to be a bit hack and slash but at least I am making progress.

Autonomous Car: Deep Learning & Computer Vision for Beginners

Nothing was done, again I need to work harder to get this done

Maths

Nothing was done, again I need to work harder to get this done

CTO / Digital MBA course.

Nothing to really do with robotics or building stuff but I am starting a new course at work which I am looking forward to (at the moment). Starts 8th of May

InMoov Humanoid Robot

Feels like ages since I went near this however except for printing a few fairing parts, the robot is complete and was working the last time I used it. Of course, I plan to make lots of improvements however, while it is still in a state of “it’s working” I am too scared to touch it l.

Redefining my goals

So I started doing this with each blog post. I start off thinking I have done nothing, then compare it to the list of things I want to do and see that I am making progress (slow but some). Here is the list from last month with updates.

  • Goal 1: Finish the Inmoov robot and fix the issues listed above so that the robot can be demonstrated to people. “Technically working”
  • Goal 2: Create a demo of controlling the mobility scooter with a PS2 controller. Work has started and hope to make it work by the end of May
  • Goal 3: Spend some time at Khan Academy on Algebra and Geometry. (increasing the priority to high as failed for many months now)
  • Goal 4: Do something around self-driving with the Van. Greenlighted and linked to the Mobility scooter one
  • Goal 5: Continue with self-driving courses. Failing badly, but plan to read https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-to-build-a-self-driving-car-in-one-month-d52df48f5b07 tomorrow!
  • Goal 6: Improve Burf.co Chat API. ChatGPT has blown my mind, I am tempted to just turn Burf.co Seach engine off. Lowest priority
  • Goal 10: Work on the electric motorbike project. Progressing nicely


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