How To Train Your Robot - Machine Learning, math and other cool tricks

2020-11-232020-11-25

Building a Linux app part 8: Adding an options screen

As you may have noticed, the repeater-START app doesn’t currently have an option to change that internal km/mile calculation. It also does not have any option to filter the repeaters of VHF, UHF or your preferred band.

Let’s see how to add a new dialog, then store the options, and load them on your program’s start:

2020-11-082020-11-11

Review: Linux in the Ham Shack Linux

Budgie Desktop is an interesting Linux distro which you can see is the base of Linux in the Ham Shack, downloadable here.

2020-11-022020-11-02

Injecting commands and debugging a running Python program, with Project Euler example

How often has it happened to you… you build a simple script to calculate something, run some bulk process, and coming back after an hour or so it just hangs with no output. Is it doing something or stuck? You could debug it, using WinPdb or Visual Studio Code debugger or GDB to run it step by step, but that would lose the time that it has been processing. Instead, you can use Pyrasite, a program for looking in to a running Python script!

2020-11-012020-11-01

Linux 5.9

Recently, Linux 5.9 was released! While folks are unlikely to see this in any distribution very soon, it brings some improvements that will be a clear reason that we will hear about it very soon (ok, enough ham radio jokes 🙂 )

Although it’s not something particularly recommended for your main system, but you could install it now – in fact with kernels of Linux you can generally switch it out and if it doesn’t work, just select the old one at the boot screen.

2020-10-262020-10-26

Better things to do this Oct 31st

This has been a challenging year for many of us, and while it may be tempting to go visit neighborhood houses for parties or candy, the extra sugar and staying out in the cold could possibly be a setback from healthy progress in recent weeks. Some say sugar worsens immune function. Instead you might consider activities including:

Reading, study
Watch some interesting Makerfaire videos, as most areas didn’t get a Makerfair this year 🙁
Build something on the computer and present at a hackathon – there’s a Tmobile hackathon, a Here Maps hackathon, Post COVID Hackathon, hack-or-treat going on.

2020-10-242020-10-24

Announcing Repeater-START Amateur radio app for Android

In the past weeks, I have noticed hearham.com repeater listing gets many requests from Android devices. Furthermore, many ham radio people already have an Android phone and are still waiting on their Librem Phone to ship. So I started an Android port of the Linux open-data repeater app, Repeater-START.

2020-10-232020-10-23

Machine learning SVM – the usefulness of kernels

If you’ve read through how Support Vector Machines work, you probably know the linear simple SVM might not work in all cases… but how does it fail? Let’s take a look at an example I tried like to my simple example… but change it to be a larger space than just 4, and separated with a region in the middle, and the region around it (positive, negative labelled areas to learn):

2020-10-192020-11-15

Human pose estimation with Python and Gluoncv

Human pose estimation is something useful for robotics/programming as you can see what position a person is in a picture. For last weekend’s Hackrithmitic I did an experiment for fun using computer vision pose estimation. To start with I found several possibilities with available libraries:

Tensorflow js has been used to say, don’t touch your face, but it takes a massive amount of cpu.
Openpose is a popular one, only licensed for noncommercial research use, and there is a Opencv example for it that doesn’t quite show how to use it.
AlphaPose is supposedly faster and has a more clear license and possibility for commercial use – if you want that as a possibility. I checked out the install instructions and worked but for “python3” instead of “python”. It also misses obvious step of installing cuda for your Nvidia system before running.
GluonCV is another, which seems more user friendly. This one I was able to get running in a few minutes with their example:

2020-10-172020-10-17

Autocorrect Remover is now up on Chrome Web Store

The Autocorrect Remover was approved to be shown on Google Chrome webs store! Now all students or teachers can access the autocorrect remover that I built with a friend recently. One month after publishing, it appears no changes on Google Docs have broken it, which is a good sign 🙂

2020-10-082020-10-08

Slide rule enters the 21st century

Some time ago I came across this online tool in a newsletter article – this is a very cool slide-rule-emulator that will not just let you move two slides, but actually slide it for you as you run an equivalent digital calculator calculation to the right!

If you haven’t ever used a slide rule before, it works on properties of logarithms, and the principle that log(a)+log(b) = log(a*b). Now it wouldn’t be very interesting to just have two normal rulers together, as sliding and adding would just let you do problems like 5+5 = 10 or 50+50 = 100 if you scale the numbers. With logarithmic scale, the spacings are off and it allows you to do multiplication in adding the numbers.