S-Stem Scholar Monica Sanchez's Blog

Week 3 has been really insightful. I am still getting errors with my beginner code to ensure everything is working, so I wanted to look more into downloading tensorflow on my computer so I could compare. I don't understand, but I am getting a strange error of sorts. The python "helper" thing tells me my code runs without error, but the output states that I need to change parts of the code and other information. I want to talk to professor Frisby tomorrow to see if he has any idea what's going on. I found a really nice sample on github that I want to use. I had some trouble with the windows download because i still do not fully understand the concept of a virtual environment, which is recommended when you download on windows. I found a really nice article that walks through using the github sample and I'm excited to use it. Since I am starting to get into more coding classes this semester, I feel a bit more knowledgeable with what I'm doing compared to last sem...

Week 2 was pretty frustrating for me because I had issues importing tensorflow with python. I was getting an error saying I could not import an object, so I had to try to troubleshoot what was going wrong. I eventually found online some commands I could run that might help override it. I was very happy that it worked, but I had issues with the sample code I was supposed to run. I was getting a syntax error, and since python is new to me I could not really understand what was going wrong. After a lot of searching online, I found that the tutorial I was following had incorrect syntax, so I found a different tutorial that was actually correct. I was not getting the desired output though, so I spent time restarting the raspberry pi to see if I could get the correct output. For some reason it kept putting a ( b' ) in front of the output.

I started the first week back looking over sample code for our tensorflow project. I reviewed a couple tutorials that show what I need to do to train sample codes. Parts of it are really confusing, but i'm hoping that when I get into it, it will make more sense. I wanted to study the code so I could understand what it is doing, since I will need to be able to mess with it more to suit my needs. I was having trouble with the raspberry pi so I updated everything to ensure it would work better. I pretty much spent most of the time prepping myself to start getting a sample running next week. I did not want to start with running the code on the raspberry pi because I had to order a keyboard for it, so I spent this week focusing on the code that I would use and understanding python syntax.

I spent this week trying to fix our corrupted raspberry pi. First, I cleared the SD card and downloaded Raspbian onto the SD card. I also had to download 7zip, because a tutorial warned me that the windows extraction tool could cause the raspbian download to become corrupted. Then I had to download balena to flash the OS image onto the SD card. When I set up the raspberry pi, I realized that I did not have a keyboard to connect to it, so I had to download an app on my phone that would allow my phone to serve as a keyboard. Through the setup process, I tried to adjust the size of the screen to fit my tv size, but it became too large and I could not see important things on the sides such as the settings button and wifi buttons. Then I needed to be able to use arrow keys to change these settings, but my phone keyboard did not have these. Then I had to download a keyboard to my phone that would allow me to use arrow keys, alt, and ctrl keys. After this my phone would not connect to the ras...

This past week, I continued working on the tensorflow program. One of my group members was again trying to download Tensorflow onto our raspberry pi and it froze. We were not able to reboot it, so he said he would get a new SD card for us to try again. Our hardware issues have been the most difficult part so far. I did some research to see if it would be possible to download tensorflow onto my computer until we could get the raspberry pi working but I ran into similar issues. First, I had to download python onto my computer. I was trying to update python to make sure everything would work, but the I was confused about how to update the python pip or what that would mean, and they huge warnings of what could go wrong if I do this incorrectly. I also was unable to download tensorflow without those updates. We are meeting up tomorrow to work more on the raspberry pi, but if we are unable to get it working I will do more work to try to get it on my laptop. In the tutorial to install, it wa...

I have continued with the lessons on Python this week and I also watched a few videos on Tensorflow. I learned that tensorflow can do other things besides image recognition. The program can also identify letters and other symbols. This aspect of Tensorflow means that it can be used to create a translator that translates words in a picture. I would like to explore this aspect of tensorflow as well, I am thinking that our next objective with this group will be to create a translator. Unfortunately, we are still having issues with the hardware. I have not worked with hardware as much, and I am more focused on the software, but by trying to fix the issues we are having, I am starting to learn a lot on the hardware side.