Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am going over a few changes to my immediate setup. Let’s get Started!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m afraid I have some sad news to start with. I’ve been shuttling BlinkiePie around in my backpack, and it’s finally caught up with me. Some time, some how, I wasn’t careful enough, and the case broke. Some time in the near future, it will likely be getting a dose of super glue, but I’m afraid the base will need to be reprinted. If it does, I will be modifying the case so the screw holes actually line up. If I’m feeling especially adventurous, I may even make it accept multiple models of Pi’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I otherwise had a few adventures this week. Neighbors were having work done on their house, and I needed to go out and about. I took Blinkie with me, and tethered it to my phone, as well as my laptop. PuTTY wasn’t fully happy. I spent a long time chasing down the supposedly different server key fingerprint, but I didn’t actually find for 100% sure. Since this is a security issue, I’m not going to share my best guess I’m about 90% sure on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Friday, I was expecting to spend a couple hours working on my project while my mother was working at the church, but my laptop politely asked to update like I told it to. I didn’t pay close enough attention, and I found myself stuck there for four hours so I could press F1 about three times during the massive update. I’m thankful I stayed, otherwise I was within a minute of having to leave it over Sabbath, and there are always a lot of people in the church office on Saturday morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I won’t say I like the update, but I won’t say it isn’t all bad. On the plus side, Windows now has a system-wide dark mode, a feature I personally find appealing. On the minus side, my laptop’s fairly old, and each new line of code it must run to keep up is that many operations not servicing the programs I want to run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking of programs to run, I went into the workshop and set up for working on Blinkie over SSH and the command line, but I was advised to install an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). I was even there an hour, and Headcrash, the guy running the place, replicated my present progress while we were talking. He talked me into installing PyCharm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I came up with the comparison that the difference between IDE’s and command line work is the difference between a graphing calculator and a pencil. The pencil is simple, easy to pick up, and important to understand how to operate before using an IDE. IDE’s on the other hand, take care of a lot of things for you. It blasts you with so much information you don’t know what to look at at first. And the scariest part is setting the thing up. There’s a lot of help out there for my “pencil,” but there’s a lot more to break with an IDE. It felt like I was slipping into a commercial airliner cockpit with only a driver’s license. I’m just glad I had someone there to figure out what was happening when something misaligned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This week felt like a lot of learning curve walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Final Questions: Have you ever used a graphing calculator (outside school)? Do you have any other suggestions for comparison?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am going over a few changes to my immediate setup. Let’s get Started! I’m afraid I have some sad news to start with. I’ve been shuttling BlinkiePie around in my backpack, and it’s finally caught up with me. Some time, some how, I … <\/p>\n