Well, I hope everyone had a rocking May, the weather was a lot better in the UK and I feel I got some useful things done. Until I list them, I can’t actually say, on the 7th of June, May seems a blur!

So let’s go over what I think I did in May

Caddy Van

Due to not knowing what’s happening with the Jeep, nothing really has happened with this. I don’t want to start hacking it to bits and then my dad decides to have it back.

Mobility Scooter

So generally this has gone in the right direction, I have 3 videos showing progress and all I really need to do is a field test which relies on me writing some less hacky code to do proportional steering and have a fail-safe.

Yamaha EC-03 Electric moped

So I did try to manually charge the old battery but the bike did complain. I then put the 48v 10ah Lithium in for a test ride and though it worked it is limited (running in limp mode). I hope to find a way around this limit however I am not really sure where to take this project

The Electric Motorbike Project

So not much to report on this however I have purchased a 2000w 48v motor kit for it. This should arrive on the 9th of June.

Autonomous Car: Deep Learning & Computer Vision for Beginners

For once, progress has been made on this which was super fun, and already progress has continued in June. In May I managed to do some OpenCV Python work to detect lines on a road. Simple stuff but understanding how it works was interesting.

I have been following https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-to-build-a-self-driving-car-in-one-month-d52df48f5b07 as a rough outline of what to do.

CTO / Digital MBA course.

This is a double edge sword, on the positive side the Digital MBA is really good, and meeting similar-minded people on the course has been a breath of fresh air. However, as work is rammed, this has started eating into my robotics time heavily.

Maths

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

Getting Fit

One success for the month is that I am running more often and my 5K has gone from 29 minutes to high 26 which is brilliant. I have also joined the gym.

InMoov Humanoid Robot

I am not really sure what’s wrong with me, I made so much progress with this and then stopped when it finally worked. It’s like I feel the challenge is over.

Redefining my goals

So it’s June, where am I, am I doing anything actually useful to warrant the pay decrease?

• 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. Just waiting to program it and take it outside
• Goal 3: Spend some time at Khan Academy on Algebra and Geometry. Failing badly
• Goal 4: Do something around self-driving with the Van. In Progress
• Goal 5: Continue with self-driving courses. Progressing well now!
• Goal 6: Improve Burf.co Chat API. Low priority
• Goal 10: Work on the electric motorbike project. The motor kit is on its way