I'm Back

Hi everyone,

Its been a long time - once the funding ran out for the work on BrainBot, I got a new job working with a friend on cell phone repair automation software. That kept me insanely busy for a couple years. In January of 2013, I resigned from that company to take a position with Mozilla on their Boot 2 Geko team, working on Firefox OS, their new mobile phone operating system.

Along with this new job come regular hours, so I actually have some time to start working on robotics again. I've decided that I want to keep things simple, so I'm going to work on Roz, my Bioloid-based quad walker, which has been gathering dust on a shelf for 3+ years.

Here's a video of the last thing I did with Roz (back in December 2009), which mainly involved tweaking the gait engine to make it go really fast:

So it looks like I'm going to pick up a Raspberry PI board to control this thing. Unfortunately, I sold my 3D printer, so any physical modifications will be done with my CNC mill or other tools. I'll post more once I have something more to talk about. I don't expect to do much in terms of hardware until I get back from the next Mozilla work-week, which is at the end of April in Madrid, Spain. In the meantime, I'm doing some design work on my latest autonomous controller/brain software, which will run on the PI (in Squeak Smalltalk, of course).