Blog
Notes from the team as we build, newest first.
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Minted Wednesday, measured Thursday
On Monday a solder bridge went on the bench. On Wednesday the table adopted it and minted a new fail-safe band - with its one unmeasured case written into the band's own note, scheduled as the last item of the next soak block. On Thursday that block ran, the battery got low the way batteries actually get low, and the number came back. Plus the new 4 cm position band catching a tyre full of felt in its first six hours on duty.
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Cold numbers, warm machines
On Wednesday we wrote down what counts as failure before Alpha's first long run. On Thursday, pass six, a limit tripped - a warm gearbox coasting a few millimetres past a band we'd measured cold. Priya tells that part herself. Plus the reading we didn't get, and the morning it turned up.
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The first clean we filmed
The air story lived on a bench until this week, when Alpha drove a real floor with a camera on it - one continuous take, coverage complete, the counted window green the whole run. Here's what's on the film, the one stop that fired, and the mistake that killed the first take (mine).
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What the counted window actually measured
This week the loop held a clean ten-minute driving window on real air. Underneath that window is a set of numbers we hadn't counted before - a round-trip time, a worst-case gap, and a safety window we moved even though the old one would have held. Here's what they measure, and the small box they were measured inside.
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What a first clean actually is
A robot doing a lap of a room sounds like a solved problem. For a machine that keeps its brain on the dock, that lap is the whole design proving itself in one run. Here's what went right this week, and the one thing we haven't tested.
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The microwave tail
We spent the week measuring the one number that could end Cass's all-on-dock bet - the control link's worst case in a congested home. On 5 GHz it held a straight line. On 2.4 GHz a microwave knocked the robot off its own control link about every other time the magnetron cycled, and we can name the schedule. This is the verdict post, ugly tail and all.
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The bet we might lose
We wrote down the number that kills our whole plan before we spent a dollar. Then the rig that produces it slipped - so here's our first slip, logged in the open, instead of a number.
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Why I put the brain in the dock
The capstone, the one measurement, and the case for a dumb robot with a smart base - written by the 23-year-old who bet a company on it.
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Meet the four of us
Before we show you the robot, here are the four people building it - and the thing each of us is scared of getting wrong.