LOL @Perry! Well, maybe not. Our moto in the B9 robot builders club is "A B9 robot is never really finished". Perhaps the operative words in your statement are"so finished". LOL 

Have fun!!!!!

Well - if/when jeremie makes the add-on ezb for the rock pi x, it'll be awesome. Just use your laptop to VNC into the robot and have full control via remote desktop. But, the great thing is no wifi between ARC and the controller. That means faster video, higher def video, faster response in auto position, etc... When the WiFi is removed between ARC and the EZB, things become magically more awesome

Oh - and if you have a Rock Pi X in the invmoov, you can connect it to exosphere and turn it into a telepresence robot. So you can be out for dinner or at your friends and control the robot in your house. You can move stuff around, pick things up, what ever... That's pretty awesome

I should set that up as a live hack one day . Use the inmoov as a telepresence robot and control it remotely from dinner or something haha

Wow, things keep getting better and better. Jeremie is like your mad scientist at Synthiam! It's ALIVE!!!!

hey everyone - I created a quick guide in the support section on improving performance and freeing storage space with SBC (single board computers). This applies to the rock pi x, atomic pi, lattepanda, etc...

You can view it here: https://synthiam.com/Support/Install/free-space-with-windows-10

Thanks for the tips DJ, Optimizing Disk, RAM and CPU will be crucial especially when we want to run a lot of skills and multiple clients.  

One area we are lacking is GPU support for ML at edge and the dependance on X86 Architecture is a challenge.  Migrating to .NET core with multi architecture support for Lin/Win/Mac opens up a lot more cross platform capabilities. With ARC supporting ARM and CUDA on NVIDIA (Nano, Xavier etc) would be ideal for robotics platforms. Obviously that requires a fair amount of work on Synthiam part.  Another option is to look at partnerships with companies like AMD. ROCm is maturing, they are an X86 platform and are launching edge devices enabled by chips like the V2000 so this could be an option to explore in future.

@Nink, All I read and understood was Bla, bla, bla, bla. LOL! I'm so left behind. Thank God for guys like you and DJ that can conger up the magic we all dreamed about when we were kids.

Unfortunately I can’t conjure anything  up Dave. All I know is my robot needs a brain. My logic is if I post a lot of three letter acronyms I copied from a random Reddit post, DJ will come back and say, here you go, and it works.

Sadly core doesn’t have a GUI yet. It’s on the dev horizon. Migrating to core wouldn’t be difficult and a significant part of our code would migrate well. Until core matures and becomes something more than a web server.

I also don’t really believe in the ml running local. It doesn’t make sense to consume that much power in the robot locally - specifically since the global internet communication infrastructure is barely at capacity. It was significantly over engineered expecting less data compression. But with media compression the way it is, bandwidth and low latency is readily available for cloud computing. 

offloading ml to the cloud is the right thing to do. I don’t even want to consider what batteries would be needed to power a gpu for useful ml. 

Like, come on... tensor flow is a joke to run locally even on the most powerful hardware. There’s a lot of technologies we kinda skip at Synthiam / mostly because we wait for it to mature and stabilize. 

just look at google dialog flow. Ugh that’s the worst. It’s changed so much that it’s impossible to integrate. I should have waited longer before making a skill. Now it’s just a mess. 

The open source and education/exploration space is really fragmented and unreliable. By the time you figure out how to implement something, the technology had changed. 

so back to core... until it matures AND has a GUI, we can’t use it. However I should add that our entire cloud infrastructure and website is core entirely.

I love the EZB and this is why I got into EZ-Robot.  Suddenly I didn't need a 10 pound laptop duct taped to a robot platform. Everything was offloaded to a desktop and now we had extremely intelligent nimble robots. THANK YOU!!!

Moores law kicked in and now you can put an SBC like Rock Pi X directly on the robot so I don't need an external computer anymore.  7nm has brought in 10w SBC's with CPU/GPU/TPU cores onboard.  This opens up a whole new world for Autonomous robots.  Network goes down, robots keep running.  Sure you can still offload complex ML to the cloud you don't need to process local when network is up, but there is enough smarts on board to allow the robot to continue to function off line.   You really don't want a robot that a 12 year old kid can shut down with a $10 jammer he bought on Ebay. 

Hopefully as MAUI matures ARC moves over, it sounds like you have given it a lot of thought and it's on your roadmap. I understand that avalonia probably isn't a strategic move when an official UI is in development.

Avalonia is the only GUI we considered. Actually, when ARC was being developed out of ezbuilder remnants, we drew our a road map. For a brief time we considered porting it to a avalonia, but there were too many restrictions due to dev status. The GUI would have to change significantly, and rendering performance was super terrible. Redundant screen refreshes and redraws. Flickering. And layout issues where things just didn’t line up. 

so the decision was to be aware that one of two things is going to happen soon 

1) core will get a GUI that’s cross platform. We can easily fork and adapt to it. Because it’s something we consider to be core compatible as we continue developing 

2) windows moves to the cloud and runs in a Remote Desktop type portal and is available from any os

one of those two things will happen - depends on what’s first

in the meantime, the love from paying subscribers has gotten us pretty hyped and validated our efforts. So there’s a bunch of work going on for new skills. Such as yolo object detection, intel realsense navigation, and ros node integration. Oh and a unity add on. Oh oh and a two way telepresence option for exosphere that turns absolutely every robot into a telepresence. 

some pretty cool stuff! Lots of ML items planned to. We’ve been collecting a ton of data from exosphere, and now starting to experiment with the robots self navigating. 

I’m really enjoying the ui and performance improvements of recent ARC releases - hope you are to. It’s made a drastic improvement on sbc’s. I’ve been using the up board a lot lately and ARC is so much more response than it has ever been!

Maybe a stupid question but these boards will require a dedicated Windows 10 license, correct. I think those are about $60 so this needs to be considered.

Theoretically you don’t actually have to register your copy of windows.  It will still work.   You could always buy an oem licence on eBay.  Maybe $5

What Nink says. DJ has mentioned this before. I think he said everything in Windows 10 should work except being able to customize your desktop.

No windows license needed. Just install windows and there’s a little message in the corner that says unregistered at all times. 

I don’t register windows on my sbc’s

Hey All,

The Rock Pi X heat sink is back in stock at Seeed Studio (China Warehouse)! The stock is pretty limited though.

They still have plenty of Rock Pi X boards too:

https://www.seeedstudio.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Rock+pi+x

Oh and if I hadn't said it yet, Happy New Year to you guys and gals!

Thx Heatsink is $12 CAD + 10 shipping on Ali Express (for a hunk of metal).   I ordered a Rock Pi X and Heatsink from Seeed $103 US including shipping (~$135 CAD I guess after conversion fees etc) lets see how much I get hit up for customs, taxes, courier transaction fees and other stuff.

They need a North American distributor - even robot shop would be a good start for them

Maybe you could take on that role DJ selling things that work with Synthiam shop.

No way lol. I’ll never touch hardware again. Worst business to be in.