This weeks update : It’s a lie : Metabase, more VEX and some data science!

So, let’s get the lie out of the way, this week’s update could cover more or less than a week!  It is whatever I am thinking of at the time, that may or may not be happening.  So apologies for that bombshell.

Software

So, at work (O2’s Innovation Lab) I am currently learning data science stuff, for anyone who knows me, this is an extremely hard task as I have the focus of hamster on Redbull.  I am usually doing more than 1 thing (usually 5) and so it can be a struggle to learn a new skill, let alone one as difficult as data science.  This week, I would say I am starting to get somewhere.  I been using different classifiers across my data, checked its score and then looked at the confusion matrix.  What that told me was that my data sucked badly, however, the upside was I could prove that my data was terrible.

Another thing I am doing at work around data (oh look at my focus) needed me to take some data and put a GUI over the top for people to be able to easy “ask the data questions”, I found a really cool free tool called Metabase which worked really nicely.  All I needed to do was take an MS Access DB (oh boy who uses MS Access), convert it to CSV, and chuck it in a Postgres DB.  Would have taken 5 mins on a PC, a Mac took a little bit longer!

Robots

So what’s new on the robot front this week? well VEX Worlds is in less than 25 days and the software is erm…. still in development.  The EDR Tank should be on way to the US, so I made a mini version of it so that I can carry on with the development.  I have written some safety features into the software so that I don’t mow down innocent kids, mouthy kids, will, of course, run over!  The nex thing I need to do is finish the bridge between the VEX Cortex and the ROS software

ROS

I have a new friend on Facebook, (whoop whoop) who has been helping me with the ROS stuff, it’s useful to have a sounding board on learning new stuff, especially something as complex as ROS.  I have a fear that the VEX Tank may not work too well with all the people moving about.  Slam and autonomous driving works (very simple form) by identifying features in the environment to try and locate itself. when you have no real features (e.g a long corridor) or lots of things changing (e.g people moving about), it can get very confused.  I am sure robotics engineers have a good solution to this, but being a beginner and using Hector Slam for the first time,  I am not holding my breath.  My mini raspberry Pi / LEGO version got confused if I farted near it, let alone 10,000 kids running around!

Ending Notes

I started a statistics course as its the precursor to the Udacity Machine Learning Course.

I finished a Sentiment analysis course, pretty interesting, showed how to work out if a review to a film was positive or negative.

I watched Logan, was very good and rather violent and definitely not for the kids

I watched Kong, was pretty good but preferred the previous one, which to be fair is nothing like the new one.

I started printing the Inmoov project 🙂 THE BEST 3D Printed project in the world!

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