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Still not feeling well. Some thoughts about pyLCI.

A project log for pyLCI - Linux Control Interface

Makes Raspberry Pi accessible, portable and easily configurable.

aryaArya 05/29/2016 at 19:090 Comments

Hi! I've been working on #Wearable Raspberry Pi personal assistant this week. Mainly, 3D printing things. I also organised a lecture on Raspberry Pi computers used with Python (I organise those with my local hackerspace), to tell and show all. It's about a week since I've been out of the hospital, and I have had planned to include some cool features... But instead, I didn't feel consistently well through the week, which screwed up some of my plans. On top of that, the lecture I've organised was not successful. I had screwed up the first stage, and pyLCI might have saved my ass.

I had planned the lecture to accomodate around 10 people, and for everybody to interact with the hardware directly - that is, everybody has a Pi and uses it to blink LEDs, read buttons and so on. I have found 9 Raspberry Pi boards and asked others to bring theirs. That wasn't a problem. Connecting them all up and starting work turned out to be *the* problem. I had prepared an image with network settings configured in to work automagically, but it just didn't work somehow - some Raspberries wouldn't connect, some did. For those which did, finding out the IP address was a problem. I included UART adapters in the course because I had foreseen this but most of them didn't even work with the computers, and for some reason one of them burned up, apparently, bringing oh-so-sensitive miniUART on my one and only Raspberry Pi 3 with it. It was a disaster, and the stress appeared to be too much for me, causing my second attack of acute pancreatitis later that evening. Long story short, it ruined my weekend plans. At least I have a doctor appointment for tomorrow, hopefully that clears things up.

Funnily enough, all the problems I had on that lecture were solvable by pyLCI. Thus, I need more cheap shields and I've acted on my own hardware buying guide:

I'll buy some more soon, to make sure our customs do not freak out when receiving multiple packages of same shields at once. The lecture was ruined though, being dependent on hardware very much - I spent about 2 hours trying to make it work and it was too much. I hope to repeat lecture in 2 weeks, with better preparation and better results. As for now, I'm in my bed most of the time. It still hurts, and one of the symptoms is body weakness, which makes it hard to even type this blog entry. Also, I'm hungry because I can't eat anything now to make sure inflammation goes away =) Fortunately, I've got enough motivation to continue writing.

One more use case of pyLCI is clear - it's education. I'm currently working on the "wearable" use case with my wearable personal assistant. For example, I need a notification system, but it's not yet clear to me how to go on implementing it. However, I hope to have that finished by the end of the summer. A separate display would be nice though, and consistent with what some people expect from pyLCI - for example, some want to have a separate display for, say, a music player, which would be active at all times, regardless of the application currently on the main screen.

I've been finally featured on Hackaday! Couldn't wait for that, it's been 7 weeks since the Tip Line actually. It didn't give me much insights into what's expected from users though, doesn't seem to be that popular of an idea. However, I'll be using the project a lot and thus it lives at least as much as I do =) There are goals to be reached, and I hope a user base will sooner or later appear to make sure this system gains popularity.

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