{"id":12,"date":"2022-04-22T04:48:29","date_gmt":"2022-04-22T04:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/?p=12"},"modified":"2022-04-22T04:48:29","modified_gmt":"2022-04-22T04:48:29","slug":"have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/2022\/04\/22\/have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve been trying recently to get into the habit of taking notes while I learn about new concepts\/technologies\/languages, and thought that it might be interesting to share some of my journey and thoughts along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before I begin, I must warn the reader that my mistakes are sometimes very dumb but that is the cost of learning! I hope that one day (soon?) I will be able to look back on this and smile over how green I was. Since my capstone project of using ML\/RL to make a self-driving car is the first large software undertaking, I knew there would be a lot of growing pains. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, it would be “How did you do that?”. I have begun to learn how visual studio projects interact with Unreal Engine, and executing different python files as well as C++ files, and building, and compiling, and plugins, and so on and so forth. It almost feels like being in a dark place with a flashlight. There are so many things to see, but so little that I can look at at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did I get here?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I am responsible with integrating infrared sensor data in our self-driving car. To begin my work, I started with the short guide on AirSim’s homepage on using IR data in an environment called “Africa”. The guide instructed to run two python files in a specific order. After fumbling a bit with downloading the environment and installing the required dependencies in my python environment — which happened to be a journey in and of itself — I ran into my first head scratcher. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

OK, so it looks like something is not being found. What is the method ‘simListSceneObjects’ doing? It’s a method for ‘client’ and ‘client’ is a quad-rotor drone. This file references that file, which uses something from another file, and.. what was it I was doing again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While working on my capstone, I remembered two things this week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Be present enough to know that you’re going down a rabbit hole.<\/strong><\/li>
  2. Occam’s razor <\/strong><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    I will go backwards and address #2 first. For those unfamiliar, Occam’s razor is the idea that usually, the most simplest or obvious answer is the correct answer. When I was trying to get the environment to run, I got an error that a dependency could not be found. I knew that I had installed it earlier, and I verified that it was indeed installed. I thought of all the possible reasons that the program could not find it. Was it somehow installed in the wrong place? Was it the wrong version of correct software? Did I accidentally install a different software? etc. To make a long story short, it was because I installed the software to my computer but not to the environment that I was running the software in. A short ‘npm install’ later, I was up and running. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Doing this project has reminded me how much I love learning and problem solving. I frequently found myself voraciously looking through anything that I thought was interesting while working on getting my program to work, however; I quickly realized that this was not sustainable. This might be controversial, but I am trying to adopt a mindset of “learn only as much as you need to know”. I don’t mean this in a classroom setting, as much as applying it to solving a problem. Sometimes I need to take a step back and ponder, “Is this information applicable to me? Will it help me overcome my obstacle?”. If there is more to be learned, I will learn it when I need it. Time is a resource that I must keep in mind. Even though the article I am reading teaches me things, it may not be wise to be spending time reading it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So these are the things that I will try to keep in mind going forward. I’m excited to see what I learn next!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve been trying recently to get into the habit of taking notes while I learn about new concepts\/technologies\/languages, and thought that it might be interesting to share some of my journey and thoughts along the way. Before I begin, I must warn the reader that my mistakes are sometimes very dumb but that is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12450,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12450"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}