#robotics Logs

Jan 25 2022

01:39 AM Jak_o_Shadows: ns12, varies a lot
01:48 AM Jak_o_Shadows: we do like hardware in this channel
01:48 AM Jak_o_Shadows: personally, I've been side tracked on christmas lights for the past few months - will get back to the robot when I have the money for nicer motors
01:48 AM Jak_o_Shadows: (and a nicer 3d printer)
02:00 AM enleth: ns12: I just read Jak_o_Shadows's remark about hardware and realized this actually ties into the questions you asked me earlier - can't speak for anyone else here, but I'm also personally hardware-focused and a large part of how my personal projects work now, the ones you were asking about, is that they're no longer really just my personal projects
02:00 AM enleth: it's hard to do much of anything in robotics or similar fields while focusing on just hardware, or just software, or something like that
02:02 AM enleth: you either end up with a simulation - oh, how cool, you move pixels on a screen, sure it's doing all the transformations in there but it just looks like a 3D game - or a hunk of metal that pointlessly flails around
02:03 AM Jak_o_Shadows: Whenever I try to actually build osmething, the issue I have is the hardware limitations
02:04 AM enleth: so you have to be at least semi-competent in several fields, but then also have time and energy to involve yourself in them fully if you're working alone
02:04 AM enleth: I used to keep my projects to myself, but that meant they only progressed one at a time and even that was slow, intermittent and unsatisfying
02:05 AM enleth: it wasn't a pleasant moment when I realized I need to become a damn middle-manager in order to get my projects to actually progress, but that's what had to be done, and that was possible by housing them in a shared workspace, then spending effort not working on my stuff, but on that space, so it attracts other people like me
02:06 AM Jak_o_Shadows: yeah,
02:06 AM Jak_o_Shadows: welcome to life
02:06 AM enleth: but now the projects are making more progress than I could've ever done myself, including in areas that I'm technically competent in, but are boring to me, like the underlying software
02:06 AM Jak_o_Shadows: i have the same thing at work
02:08 AM enleth: so I still get my hands dirty - literally - when the heavy stuff needs to be fixed, no one else at the space has the guts to tear into a ballscrew drivetrain that started making noises, or strip down a spindle, or pull a motor from the robot arm
02:08 AM enleth: but most of the time I'm dropping by to help other people along as they work on "my" projects
02:09 AM enleth: the alternative would've been me feeling shitty that other people chip in to rent the floor space occupied by approximately 5 tons of scrap that belongs to me and does nothing useful
02:11 AM enleth: sorry if that breaks the wonder of "oh wow this new guy does all this cool stuff, I need to figure out how to get that kind of opportunity", but, yeah, life
02:15 AM enleth: it's still cool to look at something complex and think "I'm pretty sure I *could* build that from scratch, myself", but there's no chance in hell I'd ever have the time and drive to actually do it alone
02:19 AM enleth: especially if there were no one to show it to, as it's being made and after it's done
02:24 AM enleth: besides, the age of successful lone inventors is just long past, the modern cool stuff that can be innovated upon is too complex for this
02:26 AM enleth: a single person can still comfortably gain a deep, detailed understanding of how, say, an indistrial robot works on every level, from the mechanical engineering of the arm, through the actuators and power systems, sensors, electronics, control hardware, software, mathematics, modeling, etc.
02:27 AM enleth: but *making* a thing like that alone, even scaled down, quickly gets bogged down in boring, repetitive, mundane and finicky details
02:30 AM enleth: for me, finding people interested in contributing to the modeling, control and UI/UX aspects of projects is crucial right now, as that's where the projects are lacking and while I know all the math needed, I am actually a software developer and I have a decent feel for UX, doing any of those things is just *not* *fun*
02:32 AM enleth: but there are other people who would genuinely consider it fun to do high quality indistrial HMI, or derive satisfaction from thinking up clever mathematical models and seeing them in action moving real hardware
02:32 AM enleth: ns12: so there's your overly long answer, sorry
02:37 AM enleth: tl;dr your large-scope projects are going to be way more successful if you find a community of people who want to contribute
02:49 AM ns12: Makes sense :-) enleth, Jak_o_Shadows
02:21 PM Urawa- is now known as Urawa