This is a very exciting area in Technology right now. There’s so much time and effort being invested in this space and its growing in leaps and bounds. I wanted to understand the technology and the landscape, so I built an autonomous race car.

Cameron started off as a project to demo the newly released Intel Edison microcontroller. It turned into a great learning experience and continues to help add to my knowledge of robotics, computer vision and system design.

SLAM or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping is huge part of mobile robotics. Any kind of robot that moves around in a non-normalized environment will need to use some kind of mapping protocol, whether it generates its own map, or is given a map. It will also need to be able to translate it actual real world location to coordinates on the map. This is what SLAM covers. SLAM uses a number of sensors and algorithms to do this. Robot Operating System(ROS) is a framework that connects different aspects of the robot, the sensors, actuators, and the various algorithms needed for the robot to accomplish a task. ROS helps to enable SLAM.

Back when you could still make a little extra income from mining Ethereum I built a rig that used 4x Nvidia GeForce 1070 GPU cards. It mined 1 Ethereum coin about every 24 days. At that time, it was around $300 a month. It’s no longer profitable  today. A while back I transitioned the server from a miner into a ML server using Nvidia’s DIGITS platform. Stay tuned for more updates.

The Nano is a great starting point for all kinds of projects, proof-of-concepts, and prototypes. It offers a great feature set in a small package and is quickly becoming an industry favorite. See some of my current and previous projects based on the Nano and other Jetson based products.

The Raspberry Pi is one of the most popular “maker boards”. It’s a great start to any robotics project, or controls project that needs a decent amount of compute and some portability. See some of my current and previous projects.

Cataloging some of the physical things that I’ve built to help with my Astrophotography hobby. Being able to CNC, and 3D print spares, or tools to help take better astro images can come in handy and save dollars.

Another way to show off the Intel Edison microcontroller, this box was basically a cool design and light show. It’s going through the transformation process and becoming a new butterfly. Stay tuned for more updates on this.