Robots Archives - How To Train Your Robot

2023-10-252023-10-25

Maker Faire Vallejo, CA 2023

This year the Bay Area Maker Faire was back after years of postponement! This was an enormous fair compared to others I had attended and included some very interesting exhibits:

2023-09-222023-09-30

Central Oregon Maker Fair Review

Earlier this month there were some interesting makers – music makers, robots, woodworking, taking things apart and putting things together – check out the video !

2023-08-182023-09-12

MakerFaire Central Oregon is coming up!

Central Oregon Maker Faire is less than a month away! This is the place to be for interesting robots, solar cars, sustainability or various interesting DIY projects.

2023-06-242023-06-24

How to build your own ChatGPT-style chat bot

In recent months, new inventions like ChatGPT have been said to be possibly the end of society, or the saving of society… but maybe this is something that is something very similar to what has been hyped before?

2022-12-102022-12-10

StarryAI Machine-generated Christmas images and app icons

Some time ago I found the StarryAI service, with limited computer-generated imagery functionality. These are the image equivalent of painting as writing would be to ChatGPT. Let’s take a look at what we can generate…

2022-11-152022-11-15

MakerFaire Central Oregon 2022

This year’s MakerFaire had some great additions and some new booths… Check out a few of the highlights:

2021-02-182021-02-18

Mars rover has landed

If you haven’t heard the news or live stream, today the Perseverance rover landed, with the first extraterrestrial helicopter!

2021-02-172021-02-16

The Master Algorithm Book Review

In The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos, the author has some interesting thoughts on the “master algorithm”. Just like physicists want to find a universal formula for everything, a similar quest is what some in the machine learning world are looking for, and could simplify or bring new insights to how the world works through collected data. Just as many useful algorithms can be used in different ways – for example a super simple neural net can find pi, or a neural net can tell the difference between a dog and a cat, why can’t there be one that could run all machine learning problems?

2020-10-192021-03-08

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:

2020-02-082020-02-08

Speech recognition made easy

There are numerous howtos for Raspberry Pi and other portable computer voice applications, like this one, but generally they are using Google’s voice api. This may work… when the wifi or network is working, but not only is this sending your voice to google, it requires payment for usage over a certain amount. Users of your robotic application may be not so thrilled when they see it is sending audio samples to Google, and that it does not even work if there is a wifi hiccup! Instead, let’s go through a simple on-device installation that works fairly accurately with no external dependencies!