vision - and the rest of the plan for upcoming days/weeks

my pi now has an eye!

the camera noir is connected up and ready to help navigate the land.  Once I have the room on the sd card, I'll be trying to install opencv 3 and seeing if I can get the camera to recognize when there is any face visible.  Shouldn't be too hard.

the following stage of opencv development will be finding facial recognition clues and adding them to a db, hopefully autonomously, but worst case I do it by hand.  Then it's time to address people by name.

"Speaking" of names, before I totalled my raspbian install, I had installed, supposedly successfully, the node modules to handle speech to text using a gui-less stub of the chromium environment.  However it didn't get the change to find out of it worked before I killed the os.  Initial attempts failed, but I hardly started diagnosing things when it went wrong.

So, order of priority:
- play with neato bot a bit to ensure it works reliably
- quickly try connecting current (borked) pi raspbian install to neato xv via mini usb and see if I can control or at least read info from the bot using python.
- further steps include:

• format sd card
• install rapsbian lite (only, no xwindows needed currently on bot)
• update os thoroughly
• set static ip and ensure I can ssh
• BACKUP SD CARD
• disable default audio hardware
• install new usb audio device and make sure it boots to it consistently
• install node 5
• BACKUP SD CARD
• get camera working
• install the node module for the ultrasonic sr04 sensor (I'll still need this, and it also ensures I haven't missed anything along the way to get this all working, such as gpio)
• try to remember what node serial module I installed that worked (go through my code...)
• get that serial module running since I will likely need it eventually
• try to talk to Neato from node... focus on this for as long as it takes until it works
• try to get Speech to Text working in node
• BACKUP SD CARD
• If all of this is good so far, we have some serious stuff ready to do!
• try to implement wavefront.js stuff I wrote into a meaningful, working robot mapping system using LiDAR data for basic angles
• try to turn robot 90 degrees and move correct distance to match invisible grid of the wavefront map
• get voice control to tell it what to do (go to room a, room b, room c, with designated targets in each room (for now))
• install chatbot that integrates with these voice controls when asked
• get female good quality voice output to respond to everything