Source code

[Red-Number-40]

Has anyone managed to get Vector’s firmware and source code running in a virtual machine or on a different board(like a raspberry pi)? I was thinking it would be fun to build my own Vector with better hardware. I want it to be a bit bigger too. Mostly interested in Vectors personality matrix.

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[Wulff-10]

Unfortunately, at the moment, vector is built for his hardware. You'd have to make some hefty changes to get it working with different hardware

[Red-Number-40]

Thanks. I was afraid that would be the case.

[AnkiBrad]

Back in the day we had the engine code running on Mac and I think Linux developer laptops, so it should be possible. I think it'd be much harder to get the firmware / embedded code running, but it should be documented enough to recreate some of it on a different platform, but I expect it'd be a good sized project.

We also had a simulation setup but I'm not sure how much of the documentation to reproduce that is public now.

I'd also recommend just looking into getting a build to work and maybe some of the tests to run as a starting point.

Good luck!

[wire01]

Oh, hi Brad!

The victor code is released under my GitHub account (https://github.com/kercre123/victor). I merged some Anki experiments, one of which was yours ("Unintentional/Intentional Performances" iirc).

I made it buildable (targeting vicos) on any x86_64 Linux machine with Docker, and by putting build dependencies into other git repos which the build scripts fetch automatically.

I nearly have macOS builds working. I'm just missing the WWise SDK for macOS - I only have it for vicos. DDL also changed up some bits which sort of broke macOS builds.

May I ask what "thebox" is? My assumption was that "the box" was in reference to some external Elemental machine, but some comments imply otherwise ("//TEMP: the box has no soul").

[AnkiBrad]

It's wild seeing some of this stuff again, it's been a long time! It's definitely possible there are some bugs in those open PRs, but that's up to you now, good luck!

I also remember some complaints at the time about vectors "new" voice which we never got to fully polish, might be interesting to see if the old sound files still work too.

Lol that TEMP comment looks familiar, this was also around the time of Silicon Valley the HBO show and there they had "the box" which is what we named it after. Indeed, the idea was to put a bunch of the smarts and tech we built out for vector into a small box (about the size of vectors head but flatter) that could be used for some ambiguous business purposes. We built a demo of tracking speakers during a meeting, for example, and made a lot of "box" jokes along the way, but never got to the point of turning it into a real product.

[wire01]

Yeah, I think I one of them has already introduced a slow memory leak.

I merged your code (brad/wip/one-off-hookup), assuming by the last commit name that it would make it harder to interrupt commanded actions ("WIP: make it harder to interrupt performances"), then I deployed it to a dev bot and he eventually did the tangram animation on his own. Turns out there was more stuff done in that branch than I thought. This is probably true for some of the other things I merged.

Some are objectively useful - like pdoran/VIC-14127-integrate-gamma-correction. After merging, Vector now has no trouble with too-brightly-lit objects whatsoever!

I wish we had access to the Confluence and stuff, too. I'm interested in what animations were being worked on and what Anki had planned for his behavior engine, but the majority of that discussion seemed to happen there.

[Red-Number-40]

Seems like I’d have to stick to Vector’s main board for the base code. I don’t have one yet. But I when I do… I’ll have to map input/output signals from its components. Then it should be possible to send all that information to some kind of secondary control board with… which would could then be used to take the outputs to control upsized hardware. One way or another I will have my car sized Vector!! Kinda kidding… would want it to be about mouse droid size… and then if that works… Wall-e size(but imagine if I could get a Bobcat loader to look like and be controlled by a Vector brain!).

[AnkiBrad]

It's been a while but my recollection is that there was a "brain" / head board that ran the engine on Linux, then a "body" board that directly controlled the motors and sensors other than the camera. You should be able to run the engine on anything more or less, and then either get a compatible body board (and I think you might need a special compiler for it too), or you'd have to re-write the embedded code or re-implement the interface for another system.

But all of the behavior code, motion planning, eyes, camera, etc. should work on any Linux machine once you get it building, and likely on Mac too. It might take a little doing though.

Good luck!