Half-Built-Robots: page 2

My avocado tree started life under a cheap clip-on grow light from Amazon. The tree is five years old now and much grown. Back in my 2022 home automation post I put the grow light first in line for…

I started my Master's in Computer Science at UW-Madison in the fall of 2018 and graduated in the spring of 2021. I spent most of it in the People and Robots Lab under Dr. Bilge Mutlu, studying how…

After the interaction paradigms studies had run (the paper was on simmer) and Authr was built (that paper was simmering too), one question was still hanging. Put a physical robot arm in front of an…

The UR5 is where I learned the Universal Robots stack. I had already played with MoveIt and ROS on the lab's Kinova Mico. Once I proved that I could handle a robot arm I was given access to the UR5…

The Kinova Mico is where I learned MoveIt and basic ROS. It was slow. It was janky. But I learned how to control an arm, which was pretty cool. The nice thing about the Kinova from an HCI perspective…

Okos Polip is the device-to-cloud service I built for my own hacked devices. You might be wondering why that odd name? Well okos is smart in Hungarian and polip is octopus. A smart octopus with a…

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…

Part 1 was the long road out of WordPress. This is the short road onto Cloudflare Pages, and it is short mostly because Pages doesn't leave you much to do. You connect the repo, tell it the build…

In the cutover post I said that if I did my job right, you couldn't tell the blog changed engines. What I glossed over is how much of that job was actually mine. A large portion of the mechanical…