First of all, for those who have so patiently helped me overcome the hurdles and angst I have faced, a hearty “Thank You!”
Second:
There seems to be a lot I’m missing here. All kinds of picky details about this-and-that, that (IMHO) should be obvious somehow or other. It’s almost like showing up for a lab assignment after having missed the lecture session where the lab was assigned and explained.
Now don’t get me wrong. The GoPiGo is a fascinating piece of work. (My micro:bot is threatening to run away if I don’t play with it soon!)
One of the things I actually do - surprise! surprise! - is read the documentation, insofar as I can find it. I peruse the fora. I read the blogs. I look for the little tid-bits hidden here-and-there.
Yet, somehow, this does not seem to be enough. What am I missing?
And please, do not refer me to yet ANOTHER entire GitHub maze, (oops! “repository”), to find essential facts that should be placed front-and-center for the interested instructor and/or hobbyist to find. As much as I appreciate what GitHub does, I would beg to suggest that it is NOT intended to be a replacement for documentation or links to essential information.
Any help or advice would be gratefully appreciated.
Yeah, there are quite a couple of things that can be improved here as far as the documentation goes - it’s a thing we are constantly trying to make it better. Also there are people that prefer going to a repository and others that want more abstraction to it (like you), so our task is in trying to meet both “parties” somewhere in the middle.
I’m not sure what you are now having trouble with - can you tell us? Judging from your post it seems like you have a problem somewhere with the GoPiGo.
There is no specific issue - there’s just this feeling that there are things I should already know that I seem to be missing somehow. . . . Like the whole Jupyter lab thing - or where the terminal is, etc. Somehow or other, these little details are things I feel I should not have to ask you because I should already know them.
For example, if I were expected to teach a class with the GoPiGo, I would expect that I would be fully competent in the subject matter.
“It is intuitively obvious” (as my Calculus professor used to say) that I wouldn’t want to stand in front of a class and make a total ass of myself, but rather I should know the topic thoroughly to the point of answering questions about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate all the help you and everyone else has provided. I just don’t want to be a pest with a bunch of stupid questions.
For those things that are separate from DexterOS, we kind of direct people to GitHub, but for those things that reside on DexterOS, we only ask them to tinker with it and nothing else.
As for DexterOS, the documentation for the GoPiGo3’s python library (and that of the add-on sensors) can be found in the root directory of JupyterLab as a folder. It’s stored in a PDF format.
As for JupyterLab itself, well, the original project was called Jupyter and was much more simplistic and basic, it’s still used, but lots of users are already migrating to JupyterLab. Its main purpose is for teaching - either in classrooms or at tech conferences.
I would really encourage you to look at this tutorial here. It’s kind of long, but it’s worth it:
And I also have that feeling of yours where I feel like I should know things that others assume you already know - it’s very common in our field - everything is so hectic and dynamic.