An excellent Bath Digital Festival for 2025. In true BDF mode, I got AI to help me write up the festival - it still took an hour and is my well-being any better?
Bath Digital Festival 2025: Reflections on Technology, Humanity and Community
Category: robots
Self-Coding Repository – Testing for LLM-Coding
Some notes from my project to create self-coding software. The post emphasises the power of testing, "good code" practices, pain points, and cool features we can leverage. These include GitHub/IDE code review GUIs, tools like Ruff and Sphinx, and Test Driven Development, modularity, code duplication, and profiling.
Self-Coding Repository – Idea Update
The author is developing a self-coding project using Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT3.5/4-turbo and GPT4, to generate code, tests, and documentation. Existing project files are used as LLM prompt context. Evaluation tools from the Python ecosystem, GitHub API and function calling options are leveraged to streamline the process. The system has been designed to cater for various programming tasks. However, tweaking different agent "personalities" and effectively managing complex project directories remain challenges.
Running Scripts at Startup
And other Linux delights. Often there is a need to configure processes to start on startup and to restart on failure. On Linux systems this process is controlled via the systemd init system and system manager. Now, as with most things Linux, there are a lot of sources of information out there. Several of them … Continue reading Running Scripts at Startup
Bio-Inspired Robotics for Beginners
Modern "deep" learning approaches have problems. The need for training data. A lack of robustness. Are they doing everything in reverse?
Capturing Live Audio and Video in Python
In my robotics projects I want to capture live audio and video data in Python. To save you several days, this blog post explains how I go about doing this.
Artificial Morality (or How Do We Teach Robots to Love)
One Saturday morning I came upon the website 80000 Hours. The idea of the site is to direct our activity to maximise impact. They have a list of world problems here. One of the most pressing is explained as the artificial intelligence "control problem" : how do we control forces that can out think us? This … Continue reading Artificial Morality (or How Do We Teach Robots to Love)
Twitter Robots on a Raspberry Pi
Or how to get very quickly write-restricted by Twitter. This is a short guide to playing around with the Twitter API using Python on a Raspberry Pi (or any other Linux machine). Overview The process has four general steps: - Setup a new Twitter account and create a new Twitter app; Setup the Raspberry Pi … Continue reading Twitter Robots on a Raspberry Pi
Hacker News Update: Raspicam & WeMo
A quick update on my recent discoveries. Raspicam I now have a Raspberry Pi Camera Board (Raspicam)! There is a brilliant combo deal on at the moment allowing you to buy a Raspicam, Model A + 4GB SD card for about £35 (including VAT + shipping!)! That's £35 for a device that can run OpenCV … Continue reading Hacker News Update: Raspicam & WeMo
Face Tracking Robot Arm
Ha - awesome - I have made a face tracking robot arm. The 12 year-old me is so jealous.Here's how I did it (on Ubuntu 12.04 but should be portable to the Raspberry Pis):I installed SimpleCV: - http://simplecv.org/ .(I love this - makes it so simple to prototype.)I built this robot arm: - http://www.maplin.co.uk/robotic-arm-kit-with-usb-pc-interface-266257 .I installed pyusb: … Continue reading Face Tracking Robot Arm
Robotic Ape 