Blog
Technical notes on robotics, metrology and automation.
A 44.8 mm miss: one day of camera–arm calibration debugging
How our QArm's first physical pick failed by 44.8 mm, and the fifteen-commit day that fixed corner-order ambiguity, mirror-flipped extrinsics and a too-loose settle gate.
A shared component broke a page nobody touched
The CI forensics behind commit ad76792 on this very site: a thumbnail added to ProjectCard silently restyled the home page, and full-page visual regression across 4 viewports was the only suite that noticed.
A* vs RRT vs PRM on one map — and the two bugs I found writing the README
Comparing lattice-based A*, RRT, and PRM plus time-optimal trajectory generation for a diff-drive robot, and why documenting your own bugs beats hiding them.
Automating SolidWorks drawing packages with VBA and Python over COM
How the routine steps of a SolidWorks drawing — 2D views, dimensions, part data, BOM tables — became VBA and Python COM scripts that cut whole-assembly drawing packages from hours to minutes, capped with a batch converter to print-ready A3/A4 PDFs.
Reverse-engineering a US$25,000 motor driver's CAN protocol with two Arduinos
How I got a downhole-rated motor driver running from a standard Arduino by sniffing its CAN bus and reverse-engineering the vendor's undocumented control sequence.
Gripper, fixtures and a digital twin: designing a fixture-driven assembly cell
How a team of four designed a custom pneumatic gripper, four purpose-built fixtures and a Siemens Plant Simulation digital twin for a semi-autonomous FrED assembly station, hitting 41 units/hour and 81.45% value-added.
Sub-micrometer IK on a 4-DOF arm: analytical solutions + Newton-Raphson
How our team's QArm fruit-sorting robot solves inverse kinematics to 0.0002 mm round-trip error, and why we refined closed-form solutions numerically.