Hello and welcome to another Burf Update, I hope you all had a lovely time over the festival season.

New Year, new goals.
So I am trying to break the mold of always doing the same things every year however it has worked pretty well. I set some high-level goals, slowly refine them through the year, and usually hit them. However, I guess my criticism of myself is there are generally too many (just look at how many random projects I had last year) and I hit each of them in a shallow way instead of an in-depth way.

Last year, I deepened my knowledge of MyRobotLab, focused more on working with the Inmoov Robot than ever before, and began learning ROS2.

At the moment I do have 3 high-level projects that are very similar to last year however I want to take it to a greater depth.

They are:

• MyRobotLab + The Inmoov + LLM
• ROS2 and the Rover Robot
• Gwiz and predictive driving

MyRobotLab
So last year I did set myself some targets around learning this, and within a month I had smashed them however I really still don’t know how it works that well. My suggestion for this year is to properly learn how the services work, how to subscribe and publish, how to integrate an LLM (Llama) and get the 2nd Inmoov robot to have conversations with people. Maybe the output of this would be to document it all.

ROS2
So last year I followed a ROS2 tutorial and built a rover robot, that uses Slam and Nav2. However, it doesn’t really work too well and I do not really understand a lot of it. ROS2 is huge and quite complex, so properly investing time in this could be a good thing. I would then like to extend it to control a robotic arm (Elephant Cobot arm).

Gwiz
Now that I own my 3rd Gwiz, I think I need to accept I need one in my life! I would like to do something useful with it, maybe look back at the self-driving course I did and see if I can get it to predict driving movements. I think the sensor fusion would be interesting and I think this would later feed onto ROS2 again.

Current state of play
I am still pondering what to do with the above projects. I have already got the 2nd Inmoov robot up and running (Since starting to write this post) and working with LLava and Llama3.2. The kids find it very exciting now it can talk a lot. I plan to continue with this for a week or so more so that its refined. I have worked closely with the community on getting this working as there have been some bugs found.

Burf.co
I really do need to work out what to do with this. Maybe it can feed in to the Inmoov Robot

Inmoov Robot
The main Inmoov Robot now has a new hand and arm, it needs testing but should be completely operational. I need to review the torso to see if that still works

Brilliant Math App
Still loving this app and have neem using it for 45+ days in a row

The goal for the next blog post is to make some decisions and refine the goals.