After over a decade of professional robotics experience, I realized I could illustrate my history through the robots I’ve worked on.
Continue reading My History through RobotsCategory: Projects
Home robot design space
Working on many robots over the last 15 years and specifically home robots the last 4; brainstorming new ideas I developed this infographic about the home robot design space. There are some sizes of robot that that are advantageous to build and some sizes you just don’t want to build.
Encoding security camera stills to video
You can’t do much better for still image compression than JPEG. Video codecs use the high redundancy of images in time to get better compression when compressing a series of images.
I wanted to archive images from my home security cameras (which save still JPEGs over FTP to a Raspberry Pi) and save some disk space so I whipped up a script to pull them down and transcode them to video.
Headlight for elBoda
My primary transportation is an elBodaBoda electric assist cargo bike from Yuba bikes. It’s a great bike and a real car replacement with cargo and passenger capacity. The electric system comes with a tail light but no head light. It does however include an auxiliary power output that supplies 6V whenever the tail light (and control panel back light) is switched on. So I headed down to my local makerspace and quickly whipped up a headlight.
Guidelines for writing code for the ESP8266
Espressif’s ESP8266 WiFi SoC is an increasingly popular chip for Internet of Things projects, both hobby and professional, because it combines a capable MCU with a WiFi radio in a single chip for an amazingly low cost. It’s received a lot of attention in many blogs but I wanted to give a little bit more technical depth on the MCU architecture and my best practices for programming it. There are some idiosyncrasies which have to be taken into account when programming to get the most out of the SoC.
Continue reading Guidelines for writing code for the ESP8266
Fixing the ¢2 of plastic that broke my microwave
The door on my microwave oven suddenly stopped latching securely and the internal switch that detects the door being closed ceased to register. My wife and I were annoyed because this seemed like a very inexpensive cheap part of the microwave breaking and taking our a rather expensive appliance. So, time to fix it ourselves.
Continue reading Fixing the ¢2 of plastic that broke my microwave
ROSCore as Daemon on OSX
Any ROS based system needs ROSCore running to provide the basic OS services. My home automation building operating system is no different and for an always on, building operating system, you really want everything to run as a daemon. However, my only always on wired ethernet server is a Mac Mini, not an Ubuntu server so I figured out how to get ROSCore to run as a daemon on OSX. Continue reading ROSCore as Daemon on OSX
Robot and Building Operating Systems
6th sense: Magnetism
While flying cars, jet packs, super human robots and cyber-neural interfaces are still mostly out of reach, some cybernetic (or near cybernetic) enhancement is starting to be possible even on a DIY level. For instance, extending human senses to include magnetism and ferocity.
Continue reading 6th sense: Magnetism
Speaking at RoboBusines conference
I am speaking at RoboBusines 2013 tomorrow on the business development panel Speed Up Your Startup about the roll of makerspaces in supporting hardware startup companies.