Welcome to another update, as you may notice this seems to be a monthly update. I am not sure if that is going to become a thing, or if I will go back to weekly updates. I guess I wanted to see how far I got in a month of having a day off of work.

So how far did I get? have I defined any goals or Targets? Have I taken on 15 new projects or actually tried to focus? So I believe I lost 1 or 2 Wednesdays (my day off) during January however they were required so I am not going to beat myself up about that.

InMoov Humanoid Robot

The InMoov Humanoid Robot was one of the main things I wanted to do last year and didn’t really make as much progress as I wanted due to other projects and distractions. Well, the good news is I have made great progress with this. I have learned the basics of MyRobotLab which is the software that controls it and I have mostly wired the robot up.

So after some initial testing, I have a list of things to fix, I guess this is expected but it’s going to take a while

• Front neck piston jams
• Lower Torse movement is not working properly (this worries me)
• Eye Y movement servo is now dead
• Eye X movement is a bit poo
• Need to finish the head roll movement (probably just gluing)

I have got to say the Inmoov/MyRobotLab Discord channels are epic and the software really is very good.

Maths

Trying to kickstart this again, I am getting better but I feel I need to sign up for a course. I did some initial simple maths stuff for a work Dipoma that I was going to do but it appears I am too qualified to do the course 🙂 I am going to focus on Algebra and Geometry. I think the plan of action for the moment until I find a course is to spend an afternoon on Khan academy on it.

Garage

Lots of work has been done in the garage, and all of the LEGO that was in the LEGO room (where I built stuff) has now been moved out. The idea is to clear the building room so that I can work on bigger projects, for example, the Nissan Micra or Tigger TGB

Autonomous Car:Deep Learning & Computer Vision for Beginners

I have signed up for a Udemy course (yes I know) that will help me make the mobility scooter self-drive. Instead of being all simulated like the previous course, this uses real hardware which I think will be super useful.

Mobility Scooter / Electric Wheelchair

So I have moved both the electric wheelchair and the mobility scooter into the conservatory. I really want to make some progress on these. They have both been jacked up off the ground so that it is easier to test stuff. I have also managed to replace the analog potentiometer (controls movement) on the mobility scooter with a digital one. I now plan to make these both remote control (still using an Arduino)

Making things easy

So another area of stuff I have been giving some thought to is removing the barriers/problems/guff to certain things to make life easier.

So for example, I made an Inmoov Robot head last year which was a fantastic project. However I haven’t continued work on it because the feedback from the speakers did me in, it was so annoying that it put me off it. So this year, I have done some research and plan to fix this issue, to bring the project back to life.

Another example is Burf.co updates, deploying website/API changes was a bit of an art form because I am using my own hosting with .Net and Ubuntu. Again, I spent about an hour or 2 looking for automatic deployment platforms. I found DeployHQ which works like a charm, now if I do a push to Git, it deploys everything ready for me to put live 🙂 This will encourage me to do more work on Burf.co because it’s now easy to do deployments!

I think these small tweaks really help and so I hope to find others that just make the process of building, creating and designing more fun and enjoyable.

The Conclusion and defining some Goals

I am not sure if ‘the conclusion’ is the right word or not, but based on the previous blog post I am staying pretty focused on the main areas that I wanted to do.

I think the goals for the next few months should be:

• Finish off wiring the Inmoov Robot off and fix the issues listed above so that the robot can be demonstrated to people.
• Remove the grounding issue from the Red Inmoov robot
• Add paging to Burf.co and update the database
• Create a demo of controlling the Electric wheelchair with a PS2 controller (on order from Aliexpress)
• Create a demo of controlling the mobility scooter with a PS2 controller
• Spend some time at Khan Academy on Algebra and Geometry
• Continue with self-driving courses