From building and running a home server to developing an autonomous robot, surveying the technology around it, and researching major corporations. A record of solo technical projects built by hand. The process of planning, building, and verifying — successes and failures alike — is kept here.
Design, deployment, and operation of an information platform independent of external cloud providers.
Ongoing field testing DevelopmentA differential-drive robot that uses LiDAR and a camera for self-localization, obstacle avoidance, and autonomous movement.
With no GPS and no map, a robot can still find its own position and build a map of its surroundings from camera images alone. From feature tracking through epipolar geometry, the difference between Visual Odometry and SLAM, the lineage of landmark algorithms from ORB-SLAM to LSD-SLAM and DSO, and Bundle Adjustment, a systematic ground-up tour of how Visual-SLAM actually works.
September 6, 2026 Robotics PrimerA camera is strong on meaning, a LiDAR is strong on geometry, an IMU is strong on motion — and each has its own blind spot. From the probabilistic and optimization-based math that fuses them (Kalman Filters, Factor Graphs) to concrete pairings like VIO (Camera×IMU), LIO (LiDAR×IMU), and BEV Fusion (Camera×LiDAR), a systematic tour of how Sensor Fusion turns several sensors into a single world model.
September 5, 2026 Robotics PrimerObject Detection draws boxes around things; Semantic Segmentation colors in every pixel by meaning. From the difference between the two, through Instance and Panoptic Segmentation, the lineage from R-CNN to YOLO, DETR and DINO, all the way to their 3D point-cloud counterparts — a systematic tour of the fundamentals of scene understanding.
September 4, 2026 Sensors & HardwareWe compare the two operating principles behind the rotary encoder — optical, which reads position by interrupting light, and magnetic, which reads the direction of a magnetic field — from a motor's shaft angle and speed sensor. From the encoder industry's surprising origin at an organ maker, to the newbot project's real measurement of a 1.2m straight-line run being misread as an 80° turn when the actual rotation was 6.5°, we trace the real story of the encoder that underpins — and sometimes betrays — wheel odometry accuracy.
September 3, 2026 Sensors & HardwareWe compare the actuators that serve as a robot's "muscles" across three angles — the BLDC motor, the stepper motor, and the servo motor. These three aren't actually a parallel classification; motor construction (BLDC/stepper) and control architecture (servo) are two different axes that get conflated. Untangling that confusion, we trace the real torque/response/control tradeoffs from NASA's brush-wear-in-vacuum problem to the birth of Wiener's cybernetics.
September 2, 2026 Sensors & HardwareWhat determines a robot's or drone's range and safety isn't the motor or the sensor suite — it's the battery and its BMS (Battery Management System). From the electrochemistry of lithium-ion cells to cell balancing and protection circuits, we compare real specs from Molicel's high-discharge cells, DJI's intelligent flight batteries, and Samsung SDI's push into next-generation solid-state batteries — and look at what the Boeing 787 fire taught the industry about the limits of a BMS.