i was gifted an origami orange narwhal!

from the Origami Animal Sculpture book

I guess origami can be pretty cool.

my partner went to take weekend glassblowing class at corning and i tagged along

(it was an encalmo workshop, for making a piece using two colors. semi-relatedly, i didn’t realize that colors affect the CTE, coefficient of thermal expansion, of the glass)

(that corning museum picture for explaining encalmo is a bit confusing, plates are made by spinning a cylinder of glass real fast and the glass centrifuges outward, so in that picture precision join is the center line between the inner and outer colors on the plate. err. maybe this a better picture maybe, where they kept it in cylinder form)

corning is about a 5 hr drive from boston, ma

we went to watkins glen state park ny first. (trying to go to cow cuddle but we would have had to set out at 7am, not 10am)

it has about a 1.5 hr loop to see a bunch of waterfalls, easy (mostly flat and paved). As it rained recently, the path was pretty full of puddles and there was spray from the waterfall. (we did have to walk past a misleading “DANGER do not enter” door — it’s actually open when ajar, if it were closed they would padlock it with chain). perhaps $10 for parking and we got a map which did come in handy.

Notes for next time: a former roommate also recommended Aunt Sarah’s Falls and Shequaga Falls Park which are a short drive (~5 mins) and visible from the parking lot. we were tired so we went to just aunt sarah’s, which, make sure to go to the “aunt sarah’s parking lot” on google maps not “aunt sarah’s falls”.

The next day we went to the Corning Glass Museum, which had both historical glass through the ages as well as an innovation section about the industrial change and technological advances in glass. The uses of glass are intense, not just windowshields and tupperware, but also fiber optics, telescopes, even missile heads.

Modern glassblowing for art does not look so different.

(click to embiggen)

Once i get my phone back i’ll post about what i learned second hand about glassblowing with some short videos.

i need to go clean up the code so the “documentation” post later —

but this was fun and quick !

I worked on this short coding challenge for many hours, got nowhere and gave up. Then in the same amount of time got this robot demo working …

Maybe 2 hours setting up a safety plane in ur5, 2 hrs on the actual hand coordinate to robot coordinate code, and 2 hrs taking videos and showing friends heh.

next steps thoughts

honestly with the word salad machine’s help (pointed out I could use servoL, aka giving it velocities, instead of position coordinates moveL) I finished this much faster than I thought and now I’m at a loss as to what to do next _{(then my brain was like “oh, it was so easy, the only thing it demoed was me not having enough experience to realize how simple it is” thanks brain that’s the whole point of why we’re doing this, to gain more experience)}

i could make the code accept z as well (right now it’s limited to a xy plane for safety), add kd (right now if you swing your hand around too fast too many times the robot starts to wildly swing in bigger and bigger circles), try rewriting with moveJ and seeing what happens, make a gripper, switch to a wrist-mount camera, make the robot high-five and fist bump, switch back to small arms and collect sock data (probably the main issue is I should set the small arms up with my desktop instead of my laptop so I’m not having to plug in 6 cables each time to go between ur5 and the desktop arms), giving the robot expressions… _{putting aside thinking about what tasks are “how to job” since that will sap all the joy out of robots again}

i think i was most excited about a robot that could fold my laundry and also do other tasks like put my tools back or sort screws. it’d be fun to have it make me a sandwich. then there’s another category of what other people would enjoy — people find interactive demos fun, and this hand-tracking fell under that.

Hmm, people also find food fun. So perhaps getting the UR5 to make sandwiches should be my next goal!!