Nacho Mellado
@uavster
Building in public, your companion robot from . Formerly Google X, Apple, everydayrobots.com, picknik.ai, demoscene.
The Jetson Orin Nano is less tall than the Jetson Nano, so we can use the lower-profile casing, better suited to carry a power bank. The one in here gives a few hours of action with the Orin maxed out in Super mode (25W). The test trajectory works fine despite the extra weight! (video in comments)
I love this timeline. My 3rd-party encoder disks did not do well in some robot units due to chassis and optical sensor tolerances, so I made my own. Resistant to all that. More fabrication cost, at 10 disks/(hour*printer), but it abstracts away that part of the assembly line.
Just designed this holder that lets you attach the camera flat cable extenders to the back of the robot's head. The extenders isolate the camera connectors and cables from any tension due to the head's bearing.
Yesterday, these brilliant high school students learned how to hack into a Mino robot! They care about price, so I'm optimizing memory usage to smooth the experience with the inexpensive Jetson Nano. A Jetson Orin Nano will still give you the premium experience, though.
Turns out you can fry a Jetson Orin Nano dev kit with the right (wrong?) short. Luckily, the availability issues they had a year ago seem resolved. Got a new one from Amazon in less than 24h. For more than those $250 that Jensen announced though.
Turns out we could have been 3D-printing overhangs at 90 degrees all along with the right slicer. Links to paper and code in comments. Video credit: Janis Andersons.
The circles mark the spots for a couple of adhesive hook-and-loop pads (e.g. Velcro). Stick the loop pad to the lid and the hook pad to the power bank.
What are the slots and circles on the lid of the HF1 robot? If the internal cells do not give you enough run time, these simple mechanism enables you to power the robot with virtually any 12V-19V power bank. Here's how you attach the power bank ⬇️
HF1 now supports a Jetson Orin Nano. Just finished the changes for the Orin to communicate with the robot's PCB via 40-pin header: GPIO: power management, time sync serial: comms with MCU I2C: audio control I2S: audio playback/record Here's a ROS2 node syncing time every 10s.
Should pivot to repairing Jetsons if all this AI robot thing flops. Over time, I've reversed engineered parts of the carrier board. Here's a simple fix for dead GPIO pins ⬇️
3D printed power button and LED diffuser. I must have done like 20 prototypes of this part alone. My son now deems it "satisfying to press" (sound on).
This newsletter could have been sent last week, right? It is from 10 years ago.
Oh, no. Another robotics company that could not secure funding. I really liked their vision of approachable humanoids.
Some device tree black magic, I2S sorcery and I2C spells later and we got audio output! (audio is a tribute to HF1's favorite cousins)
So, I was able to make the Jetson talk to the audio chip via I2C, configure the PLL and clocks of the I2S interface, power the mic and read back audio (still not reaching the Jetson). Here's the Jetson saying "hey, chip, gimme register 6" and the chip replying "Mkey, it's 0".