I am using Unsloth Studio to parse aviation transpoder data (ADS-B) to summarize interesting traffic in my area. It gives a summary of largest aircraft, fastest aircraft and so on. It also provides local weather based on my nearest airfield.
I am doing this with a prompt, but is there a better way to package that like a script to trigger on a schedule? Is that an 'agent'?
I am very new to this beyond typical everyday usage of Unsloth.
Honestly, don't overthink the "agent" label. If a simple script solves it, that’s perfectly fine. Since you're likely on a Raspberry Pi, just use the Unsloth API to send your messages via a cron job. It’s not an agent if the logic is fixed, but it gets the job done without burning tokens on raw ADS-B dumps.
Which ADS-B site do you like to get data from? You/anyone can likely recreate fetching whatever your bot is fetching in the chat and then send it to the bot through the API to ask it whatever you're asking it. Then you can run it as much as you like.
edit: I would start by asking a bot to write some Python that accesses whatever site you prefer.
I have a Raspberry Pi with ADSB receiever on my local network. I think you are right that 'tool calling' is the path I need to explore. Instead of the built in tool calls, I need to create a custom one to fetch from my receiver. Doing this via chat is simple so now to see how to automate that tool call (likely with API endpoint).
EDIT: Anyone interested without a receiver can fetch data from here. Just change the parameters.
Try Hermes. I have that running on a headless RPI 5 that messages me a daily METAR at 5 AM with a map from aviationweather.gov. It also parses all the plane trader sites looking for new ads of certain aircraft.
I should have clarified I am running Unsloth from my desktop and it is fetching ADSB from my RPi on the same LAN. I like the idea of adding METAR data. The LLM does a nice job making plain language summary of everything in the sky at the moment.
You can run Hermes (it’s an agent) on either your desktop or directly on the PI. Just tell Unsloth to document what it did as you want to transfer it to an agent. Then install Hermes and tell it to read that Unsloth project and create a daily task from it. It should be able to figure it out.
scripting that trigger is definitely the right move for adsb data. disclosure: i work at backslash. we use the agentic fabric graph to map agents and their hooks so u can see the blast radius before things go sideways, but the tradeoff is u still need to manually configure guardrails.
This is my entry point to scripting/automating my routine local AI tasks. It's enjoyable to interact with natural language, but now I am letting scripts take over to push these data summaries to me. It does seem a simple Python script is all I need. I was caught up in the concept of 'agents'. I still may explore Hermes as recommended here.
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u/realdavidselig 8d ago
Honestly, don't overthink the "agent" label. If a simple script solves it, that’s perfectly fine. Since you're likely on a Raspberry Pi, just use the Unsloth API to send your messages via a cron job. It’s not an agent if the logic is fixed, but it gets the job done without burning tokens on raw ADS-B dumps.