The difference is that despite the fact that I will never use this, I am nonetheless here to celebrate the effort. What difference does it make if someone runs a marathon or takes an uber given they may arrive at the same location?
> Your accent is Dutch, my friend. I identified your accent based on subtle details in your pronunciation. Want to sound like a native English speaker?
I'm British; from Yorkshire.
When letting it know how it got it wrong there's no option more specific than "English - United Kingdom". That's kind of funny, if not absurd, to anyone who knows anything of the incredible range of accents across the UK.
I also think the question "Do you have an accent when speaking English?" is an odd one. Everyone has an accent when speaking any language.
There's a bunch of open source work in the robot combat space, but it doesn't have to be used for robot combat specifically. The Malenki Nano is a great example: a tiny, open source receiver with three speed controllers on a single board. It has two PWM channels for servos too so you could do a ton of interesting projects with it.
Not directly relevant to the post, but seems like a good place to share.
My team and I once took on a very tricky automation project. At the time we had a complex software deployment done about once per month that involved a team of about a dozen people showing up at 4am to do it while traffic was low.
The deployment involved many manual steps and coordination of everybody involved. The person leading each deployment followed the documented list of steps and got each person to do their bit at the right time; people to run database migrations, people to install RPMs on particular servers, people to test and verify functionality. Mistakes and missed steps were not uncommon.
The very first thing we did was take the documentation and write a Jenkins job to post each step into a Slack channel specifically for coordinating the deployments. Someone clicked "go" and each step was posted as a message in that channel with a 'done' button to be clicked when that step was done. Clicking the button caused the next step to be posted.
The next release we did used that instead of one person reading the steps out of confluence. Everyone involved in the release could always see what step we were at, and when it was their turn to do their bit. This helped ensure no steps were ever missed too.
Over the following months we chipped away at that job a bit at a time. We'd pick a step in the process and automate just that step, starting with the low-hanging fruit first. The Slack message for that step went from "click to confirm you've done it" to "click to do it", with the result posted once it was done; followed by the next step to perform.
It was a long process, but it allowed the rest of the business (and us!) to gradually gain confidence in the automation, and lowered the risk of the project dramatically. Once several steps had been automated and battle-tested we removed the 'click to do' bits in between and the whole release became a couple of clicks followed by the odd bit of manual QA.