Sometime back in late 2018 and early 2019, I had gotten very near completing my beautiful glow-in-the-dark robot. Concurrent to that, I had begun venturing out in the dating world. I ended up getting married to the beautiful woman who I was dating at the time. Unfortunately, my robot doesn’t care about that.
All it remembers is that it’s been ignored and that I still haven’t finished it.
This must be addressed.
Therefore, I started working on it again a couple months ago. I now want to do another dramatic redesign.
Why? Was anything broken? Major design flaw?
No. Of course not.
What’s changed is that I now have a laser cutter and a bunch of plexiglass.
It was sometime after the initial Sniffle Snafu Panic of 2020 that I realized I’d not updated my website in years. It’s unfortunate, but a cold hard fact of life that microscopic entities can be deadly. Bad times are inevitable if there’s a bad enough pathogen, and there will be death. That we’ve had. We should be reminded that we all should be grateful to be alive every day.
Around that time there was the proposal of 15 days to slow the spread. Expecting to bunker down for only a short period, I resolved myself to make a new website. I knew I’d not be in the office for a couple weeks. Fast forward many moons to the present year, and I’d still not yet accomplished my original goal. I’ve still not been back in the office.
It seems that they should have said 15 months to slow the spread…
That said, it’s been more than a few weeks. Time to go on doing what I can. Time to update this website.
It’s been some time since I’ve posted on this blog. Now I’ve actually been working on projects worth mentioning, the long period of neglect is over.
Sometime in fall of 2017, I decided to see what kind of robot I could make. Since going down the rabbit hole, the biggest hurdles faced thus far:
Learning how to model in 3D.
Electrical engineering in general.
Mechanical engineering in general.
Explaining why I’m doing this.
I’m no expert in the first three after less than a year of learning. I never expected to be. I only wanted to know enough to accomplish my goal: build a proper robot.
What makes a “proper” robot? I’ve decided upon these criteria:
It has to be built entirely from open-source tools and designs.
It has to be remotely controllable from a cell phone or tablet.
It has to have a high resolution camera and should have night vision.
It should have additional sensors to avoid hazards in the environment.
It should powered by an Arduino and Raspberry Pi together to allow future software updates for expanded functionality.
Now that I’ve accomplished those goals, I’ve moved on to the polishing phase. Part of that phase includes writing things up in such a way that anyone else in the world could create the same robot.
In the mean time, here are some pictures from along the way:
Late 2017 Prototype
Early 2018 prototype
Mid 2018 Prototype with its top off on the pool table
Tim-Doerzbacher.com 
