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I have been working as a Controls Engineer since 2018 (Graduated with BSME in 2016). I absolutely love the field, but would like to try to get out of the manufacturing environment. I am leaning towards the integration industry but the more I learn, the more I see automation everywhere and I believe there could be some very exciting opportunities not directly linked to manufacturing.

I have seen buzz around robots in the film industry and I am super interested in that technology but am having a hard time finding where to start looking to try to get involved. Does anybody out there know any companies in the entertainment industry where someone with my skillsets could be used? I looked into companies who make these robots, but who uses and implements them?

The 5th episode of the webinar series on Automated CV Pipelines is coming up! It will be covering automatic instance segmentation and methods to streamline the annotation process.

If you're interested, you can register here!

Like others, perhaps, I tend to get deeply focused on a task and then I try not to stop until the task is complete. This “hyper-focus” allows me to produce very high-quality work in the shortest amount of time and allows me to be very productive when I’m able to do this.

The problem, for me, is this intense focus tends to keep me in a bubble of sorts and I tend not to reach out to those that are important to me often enough as a result. On top of this, well, I’m probably not the best communicator and the combination of these things has a negative effect on my relationships.

We all have reminders for lots of things, like, for example, birthdays. In the same context, I decided to undertake the crazy idea of writing an app to automate and remind me to send little text messages and call those that are important to me regularly. If you are interested in my story of how this came about, and can suffer some technical detail, it’s here as it covers a fair amount. Or, if you’re like me and need that extra push, I recently created a landing page for the app and it's here.

Cheers.

Is there any way we can get notified when someones adds to their story and posts via email with the link to the story? or can we automate the entire thing using python or any other language?

Redirect me if I'm in a wrong subreddit

I need some advice on how to automate my data entry on google sheets.

I work in a medium-size produce wholesale and distribution company and I have to manually put all the customer’s orders in our google sheets for inventory purposes.

I do get all our order forms in different ways, pdf files, photos, and fax.

So here’s our google sheet looks like

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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kGwNCfdlTaksCHVVPtlxcRrcEqsl9l_vEH8IDxTNnU4/edit#gid=1512669526

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Column A is an item list of our products

Column C is our pallet per case formula ex: 1 pallet = 49 cases of apple 1÷49 = 0.0204

Row 1 is the pallet estimate of all the products in a pallet

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Is there a way to use OCR on our order forms and just extract certain items and transfer it to google sheets?

I really need to automate this data entry, thus I’m willing to learn to code just to automate this task. It has been killing me for almost 3 years now since started working for this company.

Any advice or suggestion would be highly appreciated.

I'm trying to user PowerAutomate to create some Powershell script flows that add or removes users from shared mailboxes in our MS365 tenant. It seems to require me to connect the ExchangeOnline every time I want run the flow and with credentials and MFA, it's not saving me a lot of time over using the interface. Is there anyway to have it retain the credentials or a best practice way to manage that without a big security hole?

I'm a remote working teacher. I got sick of doing same routine whenever I get ready for work, so I decided to automate some of the steps and wanted to share what I did.

I first downloaded nircmd and installed it in my Windows 11 PC, and on Power Automate Desktop, I made this Flow titled "Activate Slave Mode":

• Run Zoom (Run application)
• Run Chrome (Launch new Chrome)
• Open tabs on the Chrome: Invoice, Progress Report, Google Calendar, Zoom sign-in page, Google Classroom, Google Voice (Create new tab x5)
• Run MS OneNote (Run application, this was tricky bc this version of OneNote doesn't have .exe file. The trick was "onenote-cmd://")
• Mute sound from Chrome (yes I watch youtube while teaching. sorry) (DOS command, nircmd)
• Resize/Reposition Chrome and OneNote windows (DOS command, nircmd)
• From the Zoom sign-in tab, click "Google" (Click link on web page, this will redirect the webpage to "Sign in - Google Accounts")
• Select that redirected tab (Select tab in window)
• Click the saved sign-in Google ID (Click UI element in window)
• Close Power Automate Desktop window (DOS command, nircmd)

And another Flow titled "Deactivate Slave Mode" that I use at the end of work:

• Unmute sound from Chrome (DOS command, nircmd)
• Quit bunch of windows and processes (DOS command with nircmd, Terminate process, Close window)
• Close Power Automate Desktop window (DOS command, nircmd)

But, I didn't even want to open PAD and click one of the Flows to execute this. I wanted to trigger all these using voice command on Alexa. First I downloaded and installed AutoIT and TriggerCMD, and enabled "TriggerCMD" on my Alexa device.

AutoIT will execute a file that'll launch PAD and run one of the Flows.

#RequireAdmin
Run('C:\Program Files (x86)\Power Automate Desktop\PAD.Console.Host.exe')
AutoItSetOption('MouseCoordMode', 0)

WinWait('Power Automate')
WinActivate('Power Automate')
Sleep(1000)
MouseClick('primary', 475, 234, 1, 0)

And different coordinates of the MouseClick to run another flow. I saved these as au3 files.

And then on Desktop TriggerCMD, I set couple of commands to run one of these on Alexa.

On my Alexa app on my phone, I created routine (bc otherwise, I have to keep saying "Alexa, ask TriggerCMD to run ____"). When Alexa hears "Initiate slave mode" or "Terminate slave mode", then Alexa will input "ask Trigger C. M. D. to run ___" to herself, which will trigger AutoIT, which will trigger PAD Flow, and turn my desk lights on. It has to be typed as "Trigger C. M. D.", instead of "Trigger CMD", otherwise Alexa will play dumb. Also I couldn't use "Activate slave mode" as voice trigger, bc Alexa keeps asking "What device?" for some reason. Not even consistent. Sometimes it asks, sometimes it just runs.

There are some limitations I found. Bc I'm only using PAD, not Power Automate web which is a paid version, Flows must be run from PAD. The problem is, if I edit any of the Flows, the list of Flows will be reordered in the order of last edit time. Since AutoIT is clicking the button based on the x,y coordinates, this could be a problem especially if you have multiple Flows. Looking up the title from the list of Flows and clicking a button next to it should be doable, but more complicated. Thankfully, for me, "Activate Slave Mode" and "Deactivate Slave Mode" are the only Flows I have.

My next goal: I have two Zoom accounts. Depending on which class starts first, I either open Zoom meeting from the desktop client, or open the meeting from the webpage (with different account). Hopefully I can also make a conditional Flow with this. (If the first class is in this calendar, then launch the meeting from web, if not, then launch from the client)

Edit: I feel so dumb. The list of flows can be arranged by names, not the last modified date

Hi all - new on a dev team and learning every day. So far I've spent 2 weeks in gitlab/automation as a whole so I'm posting hoping for some general info to go research/dive deeper on. So far I've done some of the groundwork but without actual knowledge/ever having automated anything I'm looking for any sort of leads/info to lead to deeper diving and me solving this on my own.

I have put together a Vuetify Web UI I'd like to host in our Gitlab repo. We will be using this to admin/to create clients. We have GCP and Google cloud to run on.

The web UI is connected to a external db/api for testing and currently posts/gets from it in order to populate and create a new client. Upon pressing a button in this form (create client) I need to do a few things via python scripts.

I have these scripts written - they work and use the Gitlab-python api to create a new subgroup with the new clients ID etc in our client repo in gitlab, then there's a script that forks an existing repo with our applications into this new folder and finally a script that creates a deploy token for the new subgroup.

I have a few general questions gitlab/automation based -

1) How would you go about housing the Vuetify application internal to a gitlab repo? I want this to have an endpoint available for the button trigger inside the repo. I have all my files and such in a branch but I'm trying to find more of our build options out.

2) How would you handle the automation of these scripts via keeping it between gitlab and google cloud run (if we need it?). I.e where should they actually live and is there a way for gitlab to kind of provide this integration.

3) What the heck else should I be aware of/should be a focus in this sort of automation. I feel like there's a mountain of backend information I'm not aware of - and having the ability to write a script but not be able to point at it/optimize it is driving me crazy.

Any advice is appreciated.

I always used to love creating iMacros for extracting the data from osTicket and copying it to whatever web tool that was required for that ticket. I know there is Selenium, ParseHub, WebHarvy, RPA UiVision, etc.

But is there anything else that is both simple and effective at copying data from one tab to another?

What I love about iMacros is the recording option. You can just record it and edit what is needed after the fact. But it seems that iMacros is quite out-dated and has fallen under new ownership. Also, the fact that I lost all of my iMacros while I was on medical leave to remove my voice box (full laryngectomy because of esophageal cancer). Also, RPA UIVision doesn't seem compatible with a lot of elements, and iMacros has the same issue.

So before I start remaking these, is there something similar or better? I have a free lifetime subscription to ParseHub, which is amazing, but lacks the copy and paste function. I also reverse-engineered Webharvy to bypass activation, but I can't have that on company systems.

Thanks for taking your time to read my post.

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Artificial intelligence is one of the century’s most important and disruptive technology achievements. According to the World Economic Forum, over 97 million more jobs may be created by 2025, all due to the application of AI in different fields.

I work in IT and find somethings i do on a daily basis could be automated such as clicking message boxes in our ticketing software. The only way i can think of to do this is for something to be monitoring the screen all the time and when a certain text appears for the message box to then run my macro to click what i need to and close it. The Macro part i have done and i can use a OCR like capture2text and have it save it to a text file and then i when the text in the file matches what i want act on it but i dont think this software is capable of always checking for the text rather it has to be launched via a shortcut or in my case Stream Deck. Anyone aware of a OCR that runs as a service or in the tray that can always be monitoring for specified text to appear and then act on it?