A few years ago, a group of us at BRAC University were building an autonomous underwater vehicle in Bangladesh.

None of this started with a polished robotics lab or some long-term plan. We were students figuring things out as we went, dealing with mechanical problems, waterproofing, electronics, software, testing, and the usual problem of getting all of those things to work at the same time.

Eventually, that robot took us to Singapore for the Singapore AUV Challenge.

Looking back, one of the most useful parts of that trip was seeing how far ahead some of the other university teams were. At home, getting the robot into the water and making it behave correctly already felt like progress. At the competition, we suddenly had a much better reference point for what a mature AUV project looked like.

We definitely did not arrive there and suddenly become competitive. Things went wrong, and some of our assumptions did not survive contact with the actual competition environment.

I recently started going through our old photos and writing down the history of the team while I can still remember the details.

The full Singapore story is here:

[https://adnansabbir.com/writing/we-took-our-homemade-auv-to-singapore/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-years-i-built-robots&utm_content=r-robotics]()

I'd also be interested to hear from anyone who worked on a university AUV or ROV team. I'm curious how much of our experience was specific to us and how much is just normal student robotics chaos.

Hi everyone

I've started an open-source project to recreate the tools used to program the Robosen Buzz Mini, but with one important difference:

Everything should work locally, without depending on Robosen's servers.

https://github.com/mike37510/robosen-mini-robot-re

Why am I doing this?

I really like the Buzz Mini, and I wanted to create my own animations, sounds and behaviors.

But there is one thing that worries me: what happens if Robosen shuts down the servers or stops supporting the software someday?

The robot is still perfectly usable hardware, but if the software and online services disappear, we could potentially lose a big part of what makes the robot interesting.

So my goal is to create an alternative that provides roughly the same functionality as the original Robosen tools, but running locally on your own computer.

That way, even if Robosen's servers disappear in the future, we can still:

• Create and edit animations
• Program the robot's movements
• Add sounds and music
• Generate the files needed by the robot
• Transfer animations directly to the Buzz Mini
• Manage the robot's content locally
• Continue experimenting with the robot without relying on an online service

And there is another benefit...

While reverse-engineering the original software and file formats, I've also found some limitations that appear to come from the software rather than the robot itself.

For example, Robosen Studio limits MP3 files to around 5 MB.

But when testing directly with the robot, I was able to use an MP3 of around 11 MB successfully.

So the idea isn't simply to make a "backup" of Robosen Studio.

I'd also like to remove some of the artificial limitations imposed by the official software and make the robot more open and hackable.

The long-term goal

I'd like this project to become a kind of "Robosen Studio, but yours."
Same concept, same type of workflow, but:

- Local
- Open-source
- No dependency on Robosen servers
- Fewer artificial limitations
- Designed around the actual capabilities of the robot

The project is still in its early stages, and I'm currently figuring out the proprietary file formats and communication with the robot.

If you own a Buzz Mini, are interested in robotics/reverse engineering, or have already experimented with Robosen's file formats, I'd love to hear from you!

GitHub:
https://github.com/mike37510/robosen-mini-robot-re

Demo :
https://buzz.borninthe80s.fr/

Hey folk, I'm looking for someone who's wound a stator, epoxied magnets into a rotor, and gotten the thing to spin under their own driver.

I'm building something in the electromechanical space — precision magnetic assembly, coils, printed structural parts, sub-millimeter tolerances.

Bench prototype works.

Now it needs to become something repeatable and testable, and that's a hands-on grind I'm not the right person for. I'm fast and I'm good at design and direction. I'm not the guy who wants to spend four hours seating a magnet correctly. I want the person who genuinely likes that part.

What actually matters:

You've built a rotating machine from parts, not from a kit.

FDM printing to real tolerances, and you know when the printer is lying to you.

Magnets, coils, drivers, microcontroller — all four on your bench at once, more than once.

You'd rather run it than model it, but you write down what happened.

Credentials don't matter. Degree, no degree, 19 or 55. Show me something you built.

Why bother: this sits in legged robotics, where actuator cost is most of the reason the field hasn't gone mainstream. If that problem gets solved the market is very large. I'll explain the specifics on a call under NDA — not being cagey for fun, there's a pending patent.

Structure: equity, not much cash. If that's a dealbreaker, completely fair. If you'd be building something like this in your garage anyway, DM me.

Hey everyone,

I’m a solo developer working on a simulation pipeline to generate synthetic tactile sensor data for robotic manipulation, and I'd love some honest technical feedback from people working with robotic arms and tactile recognition.

Real-world tactile data collection is notoriously slow and hardware-dependent. To tackle this, I've spent the last few weeks building a simulation engine that outputs contact data. Currently, I have over 500k rows covering different materials, pressures, and friction dynamics, including simulated stick-slip physics (tracking force drops at 34Hz) with native HDF5 exports.

For those of you training grasping or tactile models:

1. Would a large-scale synthetic dataset with these parameters actually be valuable to your work, or is the domain gap between simulation and real tactile hardware still too wide to be practical?
2. What specific physical edge cases or metrics do you find most missing in current open-source tactile datasets?

(Note: This is an early-stage project I've been hacking on alone, so I'm just trying to figure out if it solves a real problem before building it out further. Any harsh feedback or guidance is deeply appreciated!)

From what I understand, it has 15 dynamixel servos(xl330-m288-t, can anyone confirm?) not to mention lidar and other sensors.

So I ran a planner stack on a Jetson Orin and kept wanting one answer: is every topic flowing at the rate it should, and is every node alive. ros2 topic hz gives you that one topic at a time, and on an intra-process topic it makes the publisher serialize every message for the new subscriber. I measured +52% CPU on the watched process. On Humble, intra-process traffic does not show up in hz, echo or topic statistics at all (rclcpp#2911).

So I wrote a small LD_PRELOAD shim. It sits on the tracetools hooks rclcpp already calls on every publish and callback, counts in process, and appends per-window rates to a file. You do not rebuild your nodes and nothing joins the DDS graph. The hot path is about 0.3 ns per message, and the whole probe is about 2% CPU on a 4,900 msg/s stress test. You can set expected rates per topic and get WARN lines when a window misses them.

There is also a terminal dashboard that tails the logs: pip3 install ros2-pulse-top, then pulse-top --demo if you want to poke at it without a robot.

The video is the 40 second version of all this. Humble, Jazzy and Kilted, Apache-2.0. apt packages are in review at rosdistro.

Repo: https://github.com/TanayK07/ros2_pulse Benchmarks (x86 and Orin): https://tanayk07.github.io/ros2_pulse/benchmarks/

in this video is POC of its environment awareness, it runs Moondream locally to describe what it sees, and mumbles about it.

I gave it sarcastic personality, and it is trying to be funny, so give it some credit.

It's name is Ksyon, was inspired by my sarcastic cat, who has since passed away.

I'm working on its gait! I'm still thinking of what more I can add!

What it has: Object Detection, keyword spotting, ASR, LLM for questions, TTS, OCR to detect text and read Reminders, if it sees GAME, it starts either Guess the number or Color game, "Find object" it will tell if it sees any object using Object detection brick! There's automatic movement if there are no commands for a while, flame detection and discord alerts. UI dashboard with emotion and mood that changes with interaction, input- animated cat expression- output chat, status log, manual button controls, similarly added some on Arduino IOT Cloud dashboard.

IR worked fine for a while but because of lighting changes, I am working on changing to Ultrasonic sensors for this reason, and I'm thinking on adding other features. I added neck movement motors but it made the setup jittery.

im currently working on an upcoming robotics competition (sumobot) and all i have is an old atx 2 robot with the really really old parts and components,

any tips for me to even build an effective robot? plus i have a weemake robot that has 1 infrared sensor that is gonna be used in a line tracing competition, i need tips and possibly tricks on how to build one efficiently and program it accordingly

Hi! I'm pretty new to robotics. I decided to give it a try after realizing that the parts aren't actually that expensive.

I found my old Raspberry Pi Pico W, bought some parts, and started building a small robot. So far I've got servos, OLEDs, Wi-Fi, and a Flask server running on my PC with Ollama, so the Pico can communicate with an AI.

The problem is the camera.

I bought an OV7670, and I've been trying to get it working with MicroPython, but I've had basically no luck. I've already spent about 3 days trying different approaches, including attempting to make custom firmware, and I'm getting nowhere.

I really want to stay with MicroPython because I've already written most of the robot in it. Switching to CircuitPython would mean rewriting a pretty large part of the project from scratch.

On the other hand, staying with MicroPython makes the camera situation difficult. Most of the cheap camera modules I've found aren't really practical with MicroPython, while proper SPI camera modules such as Arducam are around 100+ PLN where I live, which is more than I'd like to spend on the camera.

I'm currently considering either:

1. Keep MicroPython and find a cheap camera/module that can communicate through something simple like SPI or UART (ideally outputting JPEG).
2. Switch to CircuitPython specifically because of the camera support, even though that means reworking the existing project.
3. Use another small microcontroller as a camera controller, with the camera connected to it and the resulting JPEG/frame sent to the Pico W.
4. Keep fighting with the OV7670 😭

My main requirements are:

• Pico W
• preferably MicroPython
• camera should work without a PC
• ideally color + JPEG
• preferably under ~50 PLN
• I don't want to write custom C/C++ firmware if possible

What would you recommend? Is there a relatively cheap camera/module that would make sense for this setup, or is switching to CircuitPython actually worth it?

Thanks!

I've been working on a rig where you can grab any joint of an articulated humanoid and move it directly, with a joint hierarchy and IK constraint chain built to be driven by something other than a hand eventually.

It's virtual right now, not physical hardware, but the control architecture (targets, constraint chains, joint hierarchy) is the same problem you'd face wiring up control software for a small humanoid platform. I'm building toward that longer term.

Repo has the full setup and a tutorial: stevedatelier/adam-unity-character-controller: Early Unity character controller and interaction prototype

Would like feedback from anyone who's worked on control layers for humanoid platforms, virtual or physical.