Programming a Pi to Deter Cats: Part 3

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am finally installing OpenCV on my Raspberry Pi. And if I have a little more time, I may even try getting a Hello World type program running with it; it’s unlikely though. Let’s Get Started!

Last time I actually made any progress, I finished with making a virtual environment, meaning anything that happens in the sandbox stays in the sandbox, and I won’t have to rebuild the whole computer if things go nuclear. I think. The tutorial LINK wasn’t very informative, but it was fairly instant while making it clear it was technically an optional step.

The next couple steps are fuzzy in my memory. I don’t remember everything in chronological order. I kept running into errors, but I was gently pushed in the direction of trying to learn about them when I was in the local workshop (I was sure to bring a keyboard and mouse that weren’t at odds with my Pi).

My first major roadblock was when I was setting up to compile. I was sent off to research ‘cmake,’ a command line program being used in that stem. I ended up on a page with a lot of text, and I’m an audio learner. I don’t remember much of what was going on, but I recognized enough to say I was only about 95% lost as to what was going on when it came down to fine details, like the options being used for each argument in the command.

For some reason, it didn’t work, and I left stressed over it. If there’s one thing that is just an infinitesimal less frustrating than something not working when everything you know says it should work, it’s something working when everything you know says it shouldn’t work, and you’re trying to reproduce the problem so you can fix it. That happened to me. I set up for compilation, and I ran it. Ten minutes into the expected hour-plus operation at home, it crashed. There was some library it couldn’t find based on the pregenerated header, but I only figured that out when I went back into the workshop for a second time.

Round two this week was more of the same, possibly leading to events jumping sessions in my mind, but the second one was felt a lot more productive. I found the cause of the source of the problem, and I also worked on another, unrelated topic I want to save for another time.

Bonus Topic: I’ve complained a few times about how Windows sometimes is like, “By the way, we are updating your computer in 10 minutes, is that okay?” I find that highly frustrating. It popped up two or three Friday nights ago (after Sabbath started, so I didn’t want to do a whole topic about it). My father and I finally found the settings to supposedly require human input to permit an update.

Final Question: How much do you usually know about the commands you use?

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