Category: Hobby Robots

YAM is short for Your Automated Machine (I started with YAM and needed to find some way to justify it). It started as an old dehumidifier that I gutted to its shell and then rebuilt as a mobile robot…

TL;DR: In 2019 I built a robotic sixth finger, named it after a Hungarian shaman, and then, during debugging, put it inside a plastic box because I had decided it was trying to get away from me. I…

Táltos is the shaman of Hungarian mythology, and one of the traits that supposedly marked someone as a táltos was being born with a physical abnormality, like an extra finger. So a Táltos-oid is a…

Bubbles wasn’t always in such a sorry state. He (originally a she) was a gift my little sister received (for Christmas or birthday, I forget which). The toy line was Hasbro’s FurReal Friends GoGo My…

Orion was a project I tackled in undergrad. I wanted to build a mobile base that could be used for experimentation (and I wanted it to be sturdy). Plus I had just gotten access to a makerspace and…

Triclops is another one of my incomplete projects. It started while I was a freshman at Milwaukee School of Engineering. My goal was to build a Spinbot: a single motor robot that modulates its speed…

RoverBot is an RC car hack gone wrong (but with plenty of lessons learned along the way). To set the scene, I was in early high school, having built a few BEAM robots and finished up the LEGO…

After I worked with the LEGO Mindstorms kit (see my post here), I moved on to BOE-Bot, an educational robotics kit that teaches basic electric circuits and robot control. I picked up my kit at the Boy…

A disclaimer before I begin. My thoughts on robotics kits are limited and dated. Limited in the sense that I started without kits, building simple robots, and then after kits quickly moved on to…

When I first started robotics, I was quite intimidated by the concept of programming. My understanding was informed by the Hollywood stereotype with a sulking nerd character striking keys quicker than…