The last couple of weeks has been nothing but programming around the clock. We are getting ready for a product release and a trade show at work so I have been going through the weekends at my computer, but in addition to that, I decided to do some major upgrades to the GRIME2 software I did before and during my doctoral research. The game plan is to write one more serious journal article, then move on to start working on the use of the GRIME-AI software package being developed by my friend and fellow PhD student, John Stranzl. I probably won’t get to start doing that until January or February of 2025, God willing, but that is the plan.
A couple of days ago, I broke down and bought a refurbished laptop for the bean sorting project. It surely seems to be a smoking good deal at $243.09 plus tax. I have been working to get the thing running on a Raspberry Pi and that works fine, but is way more hassle than we need during the development stage. It was necessary to hook up a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, and the camera which, during the development stage, needs to be moved around a lot. It is just easier to do it on a laptop.
I got a book for Christian at Christmas time. While he was with us, I read the preface. I liked it so much, I bought for Kindle on my phone. The premise is that the business model represented by Google will be supplanted by a business model with block-chain money that is fundamentally more secure and monetarily stable. I love the way the author, George Gilder, writes and I believe he is write on this. This is not the first time he rightly called a sea change like this would represent.
Kelly sent this photo of her and Christian yesterday. They had a pretty good time in San Francisco over the New Year. More than anything, I think they are pretty tired. Lorena and I had a quiet day at home because I was still suffering from the residual of a cold. We DID have a big steak with a grilled onion, and a baked potato. Also, I spent most of the day working on the bean sorting project. Gene has made really big progress, so I need to get an application going so that he can have a way to see what the camera captures as the beans drop. That will allow him to develop the lighting. It is a little more complicated than just creating a capture application. We really need to find a way for me to upgrade is program (running on a Raspberry Pi) over the internet. I have done this before, so it will be great to get a little more experience at doing this sort of thing.
It has been a month or so since I have provided an update on the Retirement PhD/GaugeCam projects–they are kind of tied to each other. Everything is not complete (I think we are about halfway there), but everything that is complete has been up and running for over a month on two separate computers: 1) A Raspberry Pi and 2) a plain vanilla Ubuntu Server. The plan for over the holidays was to jump back in and see if I could get the project to the point where we could do a beta deployment, but that was not to happen–suffered a minor setback due to a cold. So, now I am talking to my buddy John H. down in Arizona (well, up actually, if we are talking altitude and not global direction). Hopefully, I can get him on the project, partially because he is a profoundly better embedded programmer than me and partially because it is a lot more fun to do this kind of thing with a friend. We are still on a long slow approach to entry into a PhD program, but it is still on track. We have added two new sets of functionality that will be required for the GaugeCam work and John will be perfect for that if he has time to do it.
