About
This blog chronicles my attempts to build and program a robot based on the CharmedLabs Qwerk and the related Terk projects from CMU. Given that I’m a pure mathematician, a subject that almost delights in its lack of practical applications, I’m essentially a complete novice on the hardware side- as a teenager I used to have a R/C car, and I’m reasonably happy adjusting the internals of a desktop PC, but that’s about it. Whilst my programming skills are a bit more advanced, I’m hoping that robotics applications will provide some fresh challenges on that front too.
Fortunately, the qwerkbot hardware is simple enough to assemble at a kitchen table with a handful of tools (no soldering, for instance), whilst control options offer a learning curve from interactive control via a web browser through to complete autonomy with onboard code. I’ll probably be somewhere in the middle, maintaining the dependence on a pc to run programs developed with the java API to prototype behaviours, before figuring out how to run them a bit closer to the bare metal. I’m unlikely to solve the computer vision problem, so one of my first tasks will be to figure out how to incorporate simpler sensors.
This site is a subsection of the Straylight domain, where you can find some of the other things I do. For email, use robots at this domain.