Using Amazon Alexa to drive a radio-controlled car – Part 1

6th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

Over the Easter holidays, while watching my son play with his radio-controlled toy car, I had a strange thought pop into my head. Instead of using the sticks on the remote control, won’t it be cool to control the car by using just your voice? You could tell the car to move forward, backward, left or right. What if you could save all the moves you have asked the car to take so far and then at a later time, get the car to replay all those moves?… [Keep reading] “Using Amazon Alexa to drive a radio-controlled car – Part 1”

Microsoft Teams Announcements and New Features – Enhance your meetings today

25th of March, 2019 / / No Comments

Microsoft Teams has just turned 2. To celebrate, new features have been announced and are coming your way soon. With this wave of new features there aren’t many reasons left not to adopt Microsoft Teams. Many of our customers are embracing Teams as they see the value in a connected collaboration experience that brings together voice, chat, content & meetings.

For me, nothing beats a face-to-face meeting. Though, as people embrace flexible working, are geographically distributed or constantly on the go, connecting with others can be challenging.… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Teams Announcements and New Features – Enhance your meetings today”

Microsoft Teams and IOT controled Robotics — The IOT device

24th of March, 2019 / / No Comments

This is the third installment of a four part series on using Microsoft Teams and Azure services to collaborate with machines and devices. In the previous posts, I described how Teams and the Azure BOT services work to send commands to the IoT device attached to the RoboRaptor. This post will describe the IoT hardware and connection on the RoboRaptor to the MXCHIP.

To recap, Teams messages are sent from the Teams user interface to our Azure BOT for analysis.… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Teams and IOT controled Robotics — The IOT device”

Microsoft Teams and IOT controled Robotics — The BOT

18th of March, 2019 / / No Comments

Part 2 of 4 series into Teams Controlled Robotics

Part 1 https://blog.kloud.com.au/2019/03/06/intelligent-man-to-machine-collaboration-with-microsoft-teams-robo-raptor/

Microsoft Teams is an excellent collaboration tool with person to person communication workloads like, Messaging, Voice and Video collaboration. Microsoft Teams can also use Microsoft AI and cognitive services to collaborate with machines and devices. The Azure suite of services allows person to machine control, remote diagnostics and telemetrics analytics of internet connected devices.

To demonstrate how Microsoft Teams can control remote robotics, I have created a fun project that allows Teams to manage a RoboRaptor through Teams natural language messages.… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Teams and IOT controled Robotics — The BOT”

Intelligent Man to Machine collaboration with Microsoft TEAMS. -Robo Raptor

6th of March, 2019 / / No Comments

Microsoft Teams is excellent collaboration tool with person to person communication workloads like, Messaging, Voice and Video collaboration. Microsoft Teams can also use Microsoft AI and cognitive services to collaborate with machines and devices. Together with the large suite of Azure services that allows me to call Azure apps to orchestrate  person to machine control, remote diagnostics and telemetrics analytics of internet connected devices.

My Teams BOT  is set up as a personal assistant that  manages communications between several of my projects.… [Keep reading] “Intelligent Man to Machine collaboration with Microsoft TEAMS. -Robo Raptor”

How to make cool modern SharePoint Intranets Part 1 – Strategize (scope & plan)

28th of February, 2019 / / No Comments

Over the last year, we have seen many great advancements with SharePoint communications sites that have bought it more closer of being an ideal Intranet. In this blog series, I will be discussing about some of my experiences for the last years in implementing Modern Intranet and best practices for the same.

In this specific blog, we will look at the strategies about the first block of building a great Intranet – Strategize the Intranet approach.… [Keep reading] “How to make cool modern SharePoint Intranets Part 1 – Strategize (scope & plan)”

Create Office365 business value through the power of limitation

22nd of January, 2019 / / No Comments

Recent consulting engagements have found me helping customers define what Office365 means to them & what value they see in its use. They are lucky to have licenses and are seeking help to understand how they drive value from the investment.

You’ve heard the sales pitches: Office365 – The platform to solve ALL your needs! From meetings, to document management, working with people outside your organisation, social networking, custom applications, business process automation, forms & workflow, analytics, security & compliance, device management…the list goes on and is only getting bigger!… [Keep reading] “Create Office365 business value through the power of limitation”

AWS DeepRacer – Tips and Tricks – Battery and SSH

21st of December, 2018 / / No Comments

If you would like to know more about what the AWS DeepRacer is, please refer to my previous post:  AWS DeepRacer – Overview

I was going to do an unboxing video, but Andrew Knaebel has done a well enough job of that and posted it on YouTube, so I’ll skip that part and move onto more detail on getting up and running with the AWS DeepRacer. 

A lot of this is covered in the AWS DeepRacer Getting Started Guide so I’ll try and focus on the places where it was not so clear.… [Keep reading] “AWS DeepRacer – Tips and Tricks – Battery and SSH”

AWS DeepRacer – Training your reinforcement learning model in AWS Robomaker

21st of December, 2018 / / No Comments

If you would like to know more about what the AWS DeepRacer is, please refer to my previous post:  AWS DeepRacer – Overview

There seems to be many ways to get your AWS DeepRacer model trained. These are a few I have discovered:

  • The AWS DeepRacer Console (Live Preview yet to commence, GA early 2019)
  • SageMaker RL notebook
  • Locally from the DeepRacer GitHub repository
  • AWS RoboMaker sample simulation
  • AWS RoboMaker Cloud9 IDE with sample application downloaded

In this post, we will be exploring how to train a reinforcement learning model using AWS Robomaker, both with the sample application downloaded and in the Cloud9 development environment.… [Keep reading] “AWS DeepRacer – Training your reinforcement learning model in AWS Robomaker”

AWS DeepRacer – How to load a model

17th of December, 2018 / / No Comments

If you would like to know more about what the AWS DeepRacer is, please refer to my previous post:  AWS DeepRacer – Overview

This post assumes you have followed the AWS DeepRacer Getting Started Guide which gets you to the point of being able to manually drive the car.

So now you have the AWS DeepRacer charged up and ready to go. You have a trained model you got from Re:Invent or you followed my other post here and trained your model with RoboMaker/SageMaker.… [Keep reading] “AWS DeepRacer – How to load a model”