Burf.co

The February Update

Posted on by burf2000

Welcome to another monthly update, I hope the start of your year is going well. So off the top of my head, February does not feel like a productive month. I can’t pull out much that makes headlines. I lost at least 1 week to car (Jeep) issues, another morning to Governor duties, and so on.

The Jeep

So my father and I bought a Jeep (secondhand) to take the kids out more, my current car only has 4 seats and as I have 3 kids we always needed to take 2 cars. This has turned into a nightmare and has already wasted 2 of my Wednesdays (viewing it, picking it up) however I am sure something good will happen. This is not a project just a pain in the arse!

Governor Duties

So I am proud to say I am now a Governor for my kid’s local schools (notice schools, not school). I wanted to give back and try and be useful somehow however this got a be mixed up and I am now a Governor of 3 schools. The workload so far has been more than expected however it’s around learning what goes on and training. I am honestly hoping I can be helpful but balance this out with the robotics stuff.

Nissan Micra

So my epic neighbour gave me his old Micra which was lovely. It’s not moved for years so the idea was to get it back on the road and see how I can go with making it drive itself. Well at least detect the road etc. This had its MOT today and failed on 1 tire, however by the end of the day, that should be done.

FOCUS 🙁

So if you read last month’s update and have read the above, you would be correct in thinking I am massively failing in being focused. The first 3 items seem to be nothing to do with the focused plan from last month! Let’s review last month’s main points

InMoov Humanoid Robot

So I hope to do some work on this today however progress has been made on this.

  • The front neck piston is fixed
  • The head roll now works
  • A new more powerful power supply has been fitted (6v 60 amps)
  • I have fixed the shoulder joint that broke
  • The lower torso is now working
  • Made custom cables for it
  • I also created and 3D printed an object to raise the Inmoov up as the arms were hitting the base.
  • The right arm now has an issue that needs investigating

So left to do is fix the XY eye moment (or replace it), finish a little wiring, and configure the software.

Red Inmoov Head

This was probably my favorite project last year however it always bugged me that the sound feedback was terrible and the jaw didn’t work properly. I decided to try and fix this and it’s now a lot better. It’s stopped using the Burf.co chat API which I need to fix.

Mobility Scooter / Electric Wheelchair

So my PS2 controller sensor turned up from China which meant I was able to use it with my little Arduino project. It works pretty well now and can control the wheelchair

Maths

Very little progress was made here and I need to work on fixing that.

Autonomous Car: Deep Learning & Computer Vision for Beginners

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

Burf.co

Now that it is easy to deploy, I have been doing some vital bug fixes for it.

Running

I have started running again which can only be a good thing 🙂

Defining some goals and staying to them

So it’s the 1st of March and I think I have made some good progress over the last 2 months however there has been a lack of focus and life has thrown in some issues. Life will always get in the way but I can try and reduce the noise and lack of focus.

  • Goal 1: Finish the Inmoov robot and fix the issues listed above so that the robot can be demonstrated to people. This is not far away and has been my main focus!
  • Goal 2: Remove the grounding issue from the Red Inmoov robot.
  • Goal 3: Add paging to Burf.co and update the database. Done
  • Goal 4: Create a demo of controlling the Electric wheelchair with a PS2 controller. Done
  • Goal 5: Create a demo of controlling the mobility scooter with a PS2 controller (reducing to low priority)
  • Goal 6: Spend some time at Khan Academy on Algebra and Geometry. (increasing the priority to medium)
  • Goal 7: Do something around self-driving with the Micra else sell it. (high)
  • Goal 8: Continue with self-driving courses (medium)
  • Goal 9: Improve Burf.co Chat API (low)

Reviewing the list from last month (above), things are looking pretty good. One goal has been added around the Micra however if I do not set one, it’s a waste of money and needs to be sold.

Saturday Update: Wheelchair Hacking and Maths

Posted on by burf2000

Hello and welcome to another Burf Update, it’s odd doing it on a Saturday night but there is quite a lot to report (if I can remember it all)

Maths
I have gone back to Khan Academy and have redone 3rd Grade (lol), I am now 46% through 4th Grade and plan to do all the Maths Khan have to offer 🙂 I already have over 500,000 points on the site. The aim is to at least understand some A-level maths by mid-next year.

Wheelchair Hacking

So finally I have started to try and work out how to hack the joystick on the Electric wheelchair. I have not succeeded yet after many hours but I have learned so much. If I was brave enough to cut the wires I could really see what was going on inside. I believe it works using a microchip that detects magnetic forces (A Youtube video explained it) however he was trying to reuse the stick, not mimic it to do remote driving.

I got to learn quite a bit and even used my oscilloscope 🙂 However, I have decided that it would be easier to create something that controlled the joystick via servos so that I do not need to break anything. I have started learning Autodesk Fusion 360 to design it and then 3D print the new mechanism.

I have bought a new tool that allows me to measure stuff precisely so that I can design it properly

I have also built a little pillar drill to allow me to drill stuff out (a random thing I found in the garage)

Hoverboard goes boom

So I had a spare hoverboard to take apart as I wanted to see if I could control it with an Arduino. To do this I needed to soldier a connector onto it. Sadly though I unplugged it, the capacitors must have still had energy in them as they made a rather large spark and blow the board. I am now trying out a Scooter motor controller off eBay 🙂

It feels like I have done more electronics in the last 5 days than in the last 5 months which is rather exciting 🙂

Garage

It’s clearer than it’s been for a long time, I have a lot of LEGO to sort but making good progress on this.

Application of Robotic Tools Course

Completed, not a great course but at least it’s finished

ROS

I have started playing with ROS (Robotics Operating System), just a bit of a refresher as I plan to move to ROS 2.

I hope to either have a hacked Wheelchair or a hacked hoverboard working for the next update 🙂

Thursday Update: The RETURN

Posted on by burf2000

Hello and welcome to the first official Thursday update. Yes, there have been many updates that have come out on Thursday but they were always called Wednesday Updates. Go Figure.

Summer

Summer was rammed with kids’ stuff, work, family, and all things not very robotic or techie. The nights are now getting darker and so the geeky epic stuff will return.

Burf.co

So today I was going to shut down Burf.co because I have done very little with it and I am still annoyed with the terrible hosting company (HostPapa) who seem to be proper ropy. However, when I went to see the site stats, which I assumed were maybe 1-2k a month (who would use a search engine other than Google) I was pleasantly surprised.

Seeing as I have done very little with the site that’s quite bonkers. So instead of turning it off (due to the price of energy), I have decided I should do something useful with it.

Electronics course
Completed and I have bought the next module which is more around Robotics and Arduino’s

Review of this year’s goals

So I set out a lot of goals this year based on me working part-time, which sadly ended and I was already a bit behind. However, I have to say I am still proud that I have achieved quite a bit and I am confident I will achieve more! Maybe not everything but a lot more than last year

  • Math: Learn Algebra and kinematic (Stalled)
  • Finish Introducing Robotics  (Done)
  • Start and Finish Robotic Vision: Principles of Vision (Scrapped as very old)
  • Finish Artificial Intelligence for Robotics : This is the self-driving course I really want to do but needs maths. (Not started yet)
  • Give a good shot to Machine Learning by Andrew NG : A very famous ML course (Not started yet)
  • Get Robotic head talking and listening (Done, will go further)
  • Do something useful with Gwiz (Done and sold)
  • Finish Electronics course (Done)
  • Start and finish Self driving course using deep learning (Not started yet)
  • Build/use already built little robot to do maze-solving work (Little progress made)
  • Finish Robotic Diploma (Missed off list but was important) (Done)
  • Finish Inmoov Robot (Missed off list but is very important) (Progressing, the body is built need to do electronics)

Weirdly Burf.co which has been rewritten this year, and has extra stuff isn’t on this list.

The new focused list of things to do by the end of the year

So as there 3 months to go, let’s focus on a few easy tasks, medium tasks, and maybe 1 hard task

  • Finish Artificial Intelligence for Robotics : This is the self-driving course I really want to do but needs maths. (HARD task and requires me to know Maths better, stretched goal)
  • Do something with Mobility Scooter or Electric Wheelchair (EASY task)
  • Make progress with Inmoov Robots Electronics (MEDIUM task)
  • Do some sort of ML with Burf.co (MEDIUM task)
  • Complete Introduction to Application of Robotic Tools (2-week course, EASY task I hope)
  • Start and make good progress Self-driving course using deep learning (EASY task)
  • Get ROS robots back and running, remind myself of syntax, etc (EASY task)

Hopefully, I can do most of these, having a list definitely helps me focus.

Wish me luck 🙂

The Wednesday Update: Getting there!

Posted on by burf2000

Welcome to another Wednesday update on Friday, for the trained eye you will also notice there was not an update last week, Apologies for that! I am having a new kitchen/diner/bathroom done and so the entire house is a mess. My mum is finally out of the hospital too, and other things that would affect my Wednesday sessions are all nearly resolved 🙂

The main focus has been the Inmoov Robot

Inmoov Robot

So making good progress with the robot, the new arm will be attached soon and then I can start the wiring up 🙂

Gwiz Update

I have now configured the battery capacity meter properly so I know how much battery power I still have in the tank

Electronics course

I am 50% through this and still learning great stuff, we have not covered

  • Inductors
  • Transistors
  • Switches and Relays

Hosting for Burf.co

So Burf.co is hosted with HostPapa who up until now has been rather helpful with any issues etc. I signed a 3-year hosting deal so I didn’t need to worry about it for a while which featured unlimited hosting, bandwidth, etc. However, it seems my blog backup process uses far too much I/O resources (they first said my site got too much traffic!! unlimited??) and they threatened to shut it down! I have argued with them for a couple of weeks now as to how can they sell unlimited XYZ when it’s limited by another factor not mentioned on the sign-up. Plus my site is only small!!! Anyway, it’s still ongoing so if the site is down, it’s because of them!

It’s rather annoying as I had thought of a good idea for Burf.co however it would require more I/O resources and that would get me booted!

The answer is 2,828,752,948

Posted on by burf2000

Well I never thought I would get there and it took a few attempts but I managed to stick the CommonCrawls text corpses of the Internet into MongoDB. This is around 13TB of text, which is definitely more than I can read in a day!

The next task is to work out the language of each page, I have a few ways to do that, then ignore anything that is not English. I am not really sure how I would analyise text data in a language I do not understand hence why I plan to skip it.

After that I need to try and work out what each page’s context is, then chuck it in ElasticSearch.

File Search

CommonCrawl also contains millions (63,270,007) of links to files like PDFs, Docs, and images. I have started processing this data to see what useful information I can extra.

Burf.co Website

Shocking, I know, I think I need to hire someone to do a good job of it! Watch this space.

2019 can F*ck off! 2020, yeah baby!

Posted on by burf2000

Wow, it appears that I have not updated my blog since Feb 2019. At that time, life was great, brainpower was at a high, ideas were flowing and world domination (Burf Style) was near (Nope this isn’t a Brexit rant). Then life got turned upside down, and I had to deal (well try and deal) with a great crisis in my life, my wife sadly no longer wanted to be with me. 2019 was a horrible horrible year and so I didn’t really build anything, I shut down my sites, projects, and hobbies and just tried to deal with what was going on at home.

Long road ahead
So, I would love to write there was a happy ending to 2019 but these things take years especially when kids are involved and the process has just started however you just can’t keep my crazy brain down for too long! So while I was aimlessly surfing eBay for random things, I came across this for sale!

Inmoov Robot 3D Printed

Seeing an Inmoov robot for sell on eBay is rare as rocking horse poo, it takes people years to print these (4 years for this one) and are usually attached to a college, university or something. This one needed some work but I thought what a perfect project for me to sink my efforts in to! My dad agreed and purchased it as my Christmas present (Thanks dad).

The Inmoov robot project is one of the most amazing 3D projects out there, it allows someone with a lot of time (and some money to buy servos), to print a fully functional top half of a robot, to buy the same sort of thing would cost you hundreds of thousands of pounds. I have printed a few parts of it before to merge with educational products like LEGO and VEX however, I always run out of steam (Time) while actually attempting to print the whole thing. Buying a mostly built one means I can fix a bit at a time.

So this year’s focus is to complete this while learning more about robotics, engineering, and electronics:) I will try and do a YouTube series on my progress and I will still try to think of crazy ways to try and make Burf.co a better search engine.

Watch this space 🙂

Inmoov Robot 3D Printed

The spinning of many plates

Posted on by burf2000

Oh boy, these updates are going to get crazier!

The sale(s)

So first up I sold 2 copies of the Keyword Research Software which is on offer at KeywordResearchNinja.co.uk  The odd thing about this is that I hadn’t even finished the site for people to even access the software because I assumed no one would ever find it until I wanted them to!  I hadn’t even finished setting up my business PayPal account which is needed to make a payment link 🙁  This leads me on to…

Paperwork Time!

So, my plan is to learn how to run a business through Vibe Innovation.  For me to do this, I need a business bank account, which I also need for my PayPal Business Account.  I looked online for good deals on business bank accounts (e.g ones with little or no monthly cost) and went with Tide.  Now for them to accept me, I need to have an updated Confirmation Statement logged with Companies House as the current one reflects the previous owners/shareholders.  It was fairly easy to do but (I say that, it’s not gone through yet) this whole process is to set up an account, to finish setting up my PayPal account.

My Garage on Google Maps

While trying to achieve something, (which I have completely forgotten what it was) I got sidetracked on to listing Vibe Innovation on Google Maps.  Google makes it super easy to list your business however, it picks a picture of where it thinks that address is.  The current picture is of some white garages which is a great introduction to new customers 🙂

FOCUS TIME BABY

I am really thinking about the concept of focusing!  I really want to focus on the concept of focusing on something.  At the moment I seem to be doing far too many small things.  I do think I am making some sort of progress but I think my New Years Resolutions will be around doing less but doing the things I do better.

Echo Music 

Early morning coding (5 am) is going rather well.  Still waiting for design assets from the team but getting there.

Robotics

Making a little bit of progress, however I have a plan and it’s in this video: