I don’t know how to get to debug / dev mode on a Tesla, but did come across this old post , on how someone was in a test drive, which did have this mode. Now this is quite old, so a lot has changed, but am impressed that a lot of the components and foundational architecture was setup. I am particularly impressed how each cell in the battery pack and report its state. The BMS that you see is the Battery Management System - that firmware is separate from the car’s firmware. ...

Beware of programmers that carry screwdrivers - Unknown

As I was trying to understand more on the capabilities of the car, and what options I can do. The voice recognition on the car is quite impressive, it does seem as good at understanding as Amazon’s Echo, at least in the early days of “Alexa” (but that is a different story for another time). I was trying to understand what things can I control, or the options one has via the voice. I am still not used to it, and keep forgetting, that is a option especially when driving. As of the v8 firmware series, the following are the choices that work for voice. Credit to Ingineer for discovering the full list when hacking the car. ...

Often once hears are Lines of Code (LoC) as a metric. And for you to get a sense of what it means, below is a info-graphic that outlines some popular products, and services and the LoC that takes. Always interesting to get perspective - either appreciate some home grown system you are managing, or worried about a stinking pile you are going to inherit or build. 😄

UPDATE: This cURL script doesn’t work anymore. This was originally published back in 2018 when it was the best way to do this. Over the last few years however Tesla has deprecated this endpoint (/oauth/token) and moved to a SSO service (auth.tesla.com) which is a completely different approach. I’ll have a look and if there is a simple way to do it, then will share it here. I did write a simple Windows (desktop) app called TeslaTokenGenerator, for those who wanted to create authentication tokens for their Tesla, and use with 3rd party apps/data loggers. ...

Inspired by a few folks on a few forums online , I took the liberty to extend their idea using a IoT Button, that acts as a simple “keyfob” for the Model 3. The main goal was being to allow my daughter to lock and unlock the car at home. She is too young to have a phone, and without a more traditional fob, this gets a little annoying. ...

If you have a Tesla, and are using (or wanting to use) 3rd party tools or data loggers, the one think they of course need is to authenticate your details with Tesla. A simple, but insecure way is to use your Tesla credentials - and surprisingly many people just happily share and use this. I wasn’t comfortable doing this - after-all, they have access to your account where you can control a lot of things. Also, there are a few online tools that can generate the auth token, but again I wasn’t comfortable, as I did not know what they saved, or what they did not. :) ...

Thought of the week: Artificial Intelligence stands no chance against natural Stupidity. #ArtificalIntelligence

Seem like my training data for the car - perhaps a hint of #bias. 😂 #GeekyJokes #ML #AIJokes

Neural networks have a very interesting aspect – they can be viewed as a simple mathematical model that defines a function. For a given function $f(x)$ which can take any input value of $x$, there will be some kind a neural network satisfying that function. This hypothesis was proven almost 20 years ago (“ Approximation by Superpositions of a Sigmoidal Function ” and “ Multilayer feedforward networks are universal approximators ”) and forms the basis of much of #AI and #ML use cases possible . ...

I was looking at something else and happen to stumble across something called Netron , which is a model visualizer for #ML and #DeepLearning models. It is certainly much nicer than for anything else I have seen. The main thing that stood out for me, was that it supports ONNX , and a whole bunch of other formats (Keras, CoreML), TensorFlow (including Lite and JS), Caffe, Caffe2, and MXNet. How awesome is that? ...

Analog Islands

Someone recently asked me, what are some of the use cases / examples of machine learning. Whilst, this might seem as an obvious aspect to some of us, it isn’t the case for many businesses and enterprises – despite that they uses elements of #ML (and #AI) in their daily life – as a consumer. Whilst, the discussion gets more interesting based on the specific domain and the possibly use cases (of course understanding that some might not be sure f the use case – hence the question in the first place). But, this did get me thinking and wanted to share one of the images we use internally as part of our training that outcomes some of the use cases. ...

Trained a model to create a synthetic sound that sounds like me. This is after training it with about 30 sentences - which isn’t a lot. To create a synthetic voice, you enter some text, using which is then “transcribed” using #AI and your synthetic voice is generated. In my case, at first, I had said AI, which was generated also as “aeey” (you can listen here ). So for the next one, changed the AI to Artificial Intelligence. ...

Over the last few weeks, I built a self-driving car - which essentially is a remote control Rx car that uses a raspberry pi running Python, TensorFlow implementing a end-to-end convolution neural network (CNN) Of course other than being a bit geeky, I do think this is very cool to help understand and get into some of the basic constructs and mechanics around a number of things - web page design, hardware (maker things), and Artificial Intelligence principles. ...

Despite all the cloud talk and where I live, it is like the cloud mecca, for enterprises it is still quite new and many are just starting to think about it. A hard lesson that many of us learn (and partly how we amass our scars) is to design for failures. For those, who run things in their enterprises data center, are quite spoilt I think. Failures are rare, and if machines or state goes down, moving to another one isn’t really a big deal (of course it is a little more complex, and not to say, there isn’t any down time, or business loss, etc.). ...

Recently, a few of us went through a workshop where one of the ‘homework’ was to score oneself, on the following 7 aspects – some of these are attributes that allows one to grow from being (hopefully) good managers to great leaders. In most enterprises, as one grows in their career, managers need to acquire new capabilities – and quickly. What they have, in terms of skills and capabilities and got her or him to this place, won’t be enough for the next step – as the scope and complexity increases it can leave executives underwhelmed. At the core, new executives need support on these seven dimensions that will help them make this transition. ...

Just as last year , I wrote a PowerShell script using which you can download the PowerPoint decks, and, videos from Microsoft Build’s conference, instead of streaming it (or manually download it one by one). You can choose if you want the decks, or the videos, or both. For the videos you can choose the desired resolution (Low, Medium, High) – of course the higher the resolution, the more space is needed. The script also downloads the description and if there is a session image (if there is one). ...

If you were trying to pull the latest source code on your Raspberry Pi for donkeycar, and get the following error, then probably your clock is off (and I guess some nonce is failing). This can happen if your pi had been powered off for a while (as in my case), and it’s clock is off ( clock drift is a real thing) :). ...

Can #AI make me look (more) presentable? The jury is out I think. This is called style transfer, where the style/technique from a kind of painting (could be a photos too) is applied to an image, to create a new image. I took this using the built-in camera on my machine sitting at my desk and then applying the different kind of ‘styles’ on it. Each of these styles are is a separate #deeplearning model that has learned how to apply the relevant style to a source image. ...

Yesterday it worked Today it is not working #AI is like that #Haiku #GeekyHaiku #GeekyJokes

Rather than a beep Or a rude error message, These words: “File not found.” #Haiku #GeekyHaiku #GeekyJokes

One of the challenges we have with AI is that there isn’t any universal definition - it is a broad category that means everything to everyone. Debating the rights, and, the wrongs, and the should’s and the shouldn’t s is another post though. DARPA outlines this as the “programmed ability to process information” and across a certain set of criteria that span across perceiving, learning, abstracting, and, reasoning. ...

Cognitive Bias