Is there an updated setup guide for TJbot?

[liquidcross]

Given the notable changes to IBM's cloud and AI projects since TJbot was originally released, is there an update guide/recipes to get the project up and running out of the box? The default recipes no longer work.

[jweisz]

Hi @liquidcross -- I think the short answer is some combination of "yes", "no", and "sort of" 😬. I'll try to explain.

You're absolutely right that a lot has changed since we first launched TJBot:

• a lot of the IBM Cloud services that we originally used no longer exist or were transformed into different services
• new Raspberry Pi hardware was released (e.g. RPi 4, RPi 5, Pi Zero W…)
• there were multiple new releases of the Raspberry Pi OS, plus upgrades to existing 3rd party libs (e.g. Node.js)
• LLMs didn't exist when TJBot first came out
• Python is very popular as the language for writing AI applications

👆 Given all of these changes, I've been working with a (very) small group of volunteers to give TJBot a "refresh" and bring it up-to-date. We are actively working on a number of things toward a new 3.0 release, but as this is a volunteer effort, our progress is fairly slow.

• We've moved a lot of documentation out of README files and onto the wiki (https://github.com/ibmtjbot/tjbot/wiki)
• We are currently working through some hardware issues on the RPi 5 with LED & Servo operation, as the GPIO hardware is completely new and none of the existing software libraries work anymore (happening in this branch: https://github.com/ibmtjbot/node-tjbotlib/tree/pi5)
• We started a python implementation of the tjbot library to give developers the choice between writing recipes in python or javascript (private repo for now since it's nowhere near ready for use)
• We are currently rewriting the tjbot library in typescript to make it easier for us to maintain and target different RPi hardware (also happening in this branch: https://github.com/ibmtjbot/node-tjbotlib/tree/pi5)
• We added new recipes to showcase TJBot using watsonx.ai and watsonx Assistant (https://github.com/ibmtjbot/tjbot/tree/dev/recipes)

And there's probably more things on our list that I'm not recalling right now. 🤪

So the "no" part of the answer is that none of this stuff is ready for use yet, the "yes" part of the answer is that we've at least identified what we need to update to bring TJBot back to life, and the "sort of" part of the answer is that a lot of this stuff is in flight (but I can't give you a great estimate on when it'll all be ready).

If you're interested in contributing, we could definitely use the help! Let me know.

[liquidcross]

Great, this is exactly what I was hoping for! This was all triggered by my finally getting around to building one, because I finally got my hands on a 3D printer and found some use for my ol' Pi 3. Looks like the project is in good hands, I just need to wait to proceed! Thanks again!!