My weekend with ChatGPT

So, the other day as I was pulling up to the driveway and I get couple of messages from my 12-year-old daughter. As I park the car and look at the phone, I see that she has sent several screen shots of what looks like her laptop screen. Amongst the screen shots, there was a message that said, “This is legit rlly scary abut also rlly cool”. So, since I was already home rather than going through the screen shots, I just walked up to her room, and she had the look utter amazement and excitement on her face. The first thing she did was she questioned me to find out if I had seen her messages, I let her know that I had not and that is why I was in her room. I was curious to find out what it was that scared and excited her so much and to my surprise, she had ChatGPT up on her laptop with several interesting prompts (screen shots below). As I was processing the rollercoaster of emotions, she tells me that I should just use ChatGPT to write the post that I had mentioned to her earlier. Before I could defend myself, she proceeds to enters the prompt “write me an article of how I used ChatGPT to write code for my raspberry pi to get it to display a qr code” (see answer below). As she read through the output, she had a rather unexpected reaction. She noticed that unlike people ChatGPT not take as much credit in the article as opposed to if a person had written it. I am just going to stay away from this rabbit hole for now.

Now, let me back up a bit to explain what led her to having this interaction with #chatgpt . As a lifelong tinkerer, I have accumulated things such as RapberryPis, microcontrollers and displays. Hang on, I’ll come back to this in a bit, need to back up some more.

Ever since my youngest received one of those day-to-day calendar for Christmas couple of years ago, he would wake up?every day and first thing he would do is read the day’s calendar and share it with the rest of the family. His daily excitement with this simple act inspired me to see if I could use some of those parts mentioned above to recreate a similar reaction and use it to feed his #curiosity. My thought was to compile a list of sites like word of the day or a joke of the day or Nasa’s picture of the day and generate a QR Code on daily basis that he can scan with his iPad and learn something new. I had the hardware to build something using the Pi Zero that I had cannibalized from one of those Google AIY Voice kits and a WaveShare 2.7 inch e-paper display laying around somewhere. Perfect, have an idea, hardware and some free time here and there to tinker with it.

Being a recovering developer that I am, I knew that I was extremely rusty, and it will take me some time to get up speed with just the basics before I can even think about doing anything, so I just sat on it for a year. Who am I kidding, it was that and laziness, mostly #laziness.

So, when ChatGPT 3.5 was released in November, like most folks I took notice and started paying attention to all the interesting things people were using it for and exploring. I talked to the kids about it and to my surprise, I found out that my stepson even used it to write a few things. I saw my daughter explore it here and there as well.

Not soon after version 4 was released, I wondered if I could use ChatGPT to build the QR code generating app. ?To test the waters, one evening I created an account and asked ChatGPT to generate a python script that generates a QR code based on a URL for Raspberry Pi Zero using WaveShare 2.7-inch V 1.2 e-paper and to my utter amazement, not only the code was generated but output included explanations including the libraries I would need to install as well as explanation of portions of the code. Realizing that now, not only can I be lazy but I can also build the app, I rummaged through the boxes and dug out the Pi Zero, the e-paper display as well as started printing the case for it.

With case in hand and everything put together, I opened the laptop as we started the Cesar Chavez weekend. With Raspbian installed and SSH ready, I fired up ChatGPT to see if I can have the solution up and running by Sunday evening. I will spare the emotional roller coaster I went through as started working with ChatGPT and Pi. To my complete shock, I had the initial MVP done in before bedtime. I tried using Google but kept going back to ChatGPT as it was proving the most productive responses with explanations. It was the additional context and explanation of the code that truly made the difference. Even if the code generated was not exactly what I needed, it was close enough and with explanation it contained, I was able to save hours. The MVP included the following features.

-?????????Read file that contained list of URLs.

-?????????Randomly select a line and use that generate a QR code

-?????????Use OpenWeather API to get weather conditions.

-?????????Provide Dinner ideas/suggestions.

Now, I must admit, I struggled mightily trying to set up a cron job that would run every night. My self-esteem walked away over that one but that is a story for another day. Anyways back to the QR generator, or QR-Inator as we named it (kids helped with the name). I proudly unveiled my work to the kids, and we started talking about how I used ChatGPT to help me build it. During our conversation, I mentioned to them that I am thinking about sharing this experience with other by writing a post. To which with a mix of irony and curiosity my daughter asks me, “why don’t you just use ChatGPT to write it?”. I just looked at her and realized that I simply did not have a good answer to that question.

So, where does that leave us? Well, for one, the QR-Inator has been in production for a week now and it has achieved the initial objective, I get daily feedback from the primary users (kids). We are having fun with it and used ChatGPT when my daughter asked for some feedback on a math problem. I simply asked ChatGPT “Give daughter positive feedback on correctly solving math problem”. We had a good laugh about that one. Also, I find myself using ChatGPT more and more daily and I suspect my kids will be using it more and more.

Lastly, I realized that AI is and will continue to permeate every aspect of our lives. Especially multimodal solutions that are built on LLMs. We cannot un-ring the LLM bell, it is our responsibility to educate the next generation so that they are aware of the potential it holds for their future.

If you made it this far, you could compare my meandering write up and compare it to ChatGPT’s output below. Who knows, I might see if ChatGPT can help me with building a photo booth using a RaspberryPi next long weekend.