6 months ago, I thought it was joke. A toy. AI searches returned wrong results, images came back with 6 fingers.
Recently I started scanning and 'fixing' my parent's old photographs to share with my brother and sis. Amazed at the results. Scratches gone, tastefully colorized if asked. Took a pic of friends wedding on a boat. Sunrise in the background, they were washed out. Gemini fixed this too, and didn't change them.
I started programming in the early 80's, almost made a career out of it. Basic, machine language debugging, assembler, Fortran, Pascal and and some data base languages. Useless today. Did some minor stuff since, I can read C well enough to follow and fix, mentoring a HS Robotics team and firmware for some plastic printers. It was a struggle, and I've unfortunately forgotten more than I can remember.
Lately I've wanted to do some custom controllers. Home automation, pool monitoring and control.
During Covid I spend days trying to get an arduino to talk to a display that never worked.
Last night I started with a esp32 that has a built in screen. Did a few simple things to confirm it works.
Then I made it harder. After about 10 iterations (maybe 2 hours total) I was able to get this $12 board to log into my wifi network, query NOAA for tide information, query OpenWeather for forcast, and display a tides chart with ticker tape of the winds, temp, and precipitation. All from this prompt:
Quote:
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Using ESP32-2432S028R provide distribution ready software to display tide and weather information.SSID=xxxxx, password=xxxx. get weather prediction data including precipitation high wind and high temperature forecast from OpenWeatherMap for location ip- code here>. API key is <obtained from OpenWeather-free>. Update data every 30 minutes, display along bottom of. the display ticker-tape fashion . include precipitation high wind and high temperature forecast. get future high and low tide data from noaa station xxxx for a duration of 24 hours. display tide data points connected with an interpreted sign wave, label high and low points.
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Some of the prompts were actual suggestions from Gemini, like "interpreted sign wave" when the first display was straight lines connecting the points. Gemini also provided the answers for obtaining the data when asked, and suggested improvements & changes.