Archives: 2026

BEADZ was envisioned as a cryptocurrency backed by a jar of beads. One token is (approximately) one bead. The jar sits in a cardboard box with a webcam pointed at it, and the camera is built to sign a…

What happens when tokenmaxxing gets to the point where you aren't even willing to open a text editor to write your blog anymore? Well, I built a human-LLM loop for such a workflow. This post is part…

Part 1 got the posts out of WordPress. Part 2 got the build onto Cloudflare Pages. Both of those ended with a blog that lives in a git repo and a theme that lives in that same repo, tangled up with…

During freshman undergrad at MSOE, each engineering student was issued a laptop. My first one came in 2014. Junior year we were offered a new refreshed system, which we could keep upon graduation, and…

This printer is my husband's baby. He bought it after some research, when Micro Center opened up in Santa Clara. He wanted to upgrade from the Prusa Mini and reprint the robot arm, the PAROL6 from…

I started soldering as a kid. My dad and I went to SciPlus (American Science and Surplus) and bought an analog variable temp iron. It worked well for learning. One lesson a bit more painful than the…

The Raspberry Pi 3B+ is a decent little SBC that I have used for robot projects in the past. It was the brain of YAM for a while, running ROS on Ubuntu with MATE Desktop…

My husband (boyfriend at the time) bought the Prusa Mini for us in December 2022 as a Christmas gift (I was always talking up the Prusa to him). We used it once we got back from travels. My mentor…

I bought an iRobot Roomba i7+ in 2021 to clean the one bedroom flat I had just moved into. It has served well since. It has moved apartments with me twice and shows up in both my 2022 and 2025 home…

YAM is short for Your Automated Machine (I started with YAM and needed to find some way to justify it). It started as an old dehumidifier that I gutted to its shell and then rebuilt as a mobile robot…

My avocado tree started life under a cheap clip-on grow light from Amazon. The tree is five years old now and much grown. Back in my 2022 home automation post I put the grow light first in line for…

I started my Master's in Computer Science at UW-Madison in the fall of 2018 and graduated in the spring of 2021. I spent most of it in the People and Robots Lab under Dr. Bilge Mutlu, studying how…

After the interaction paradigms studies had run (the paper was on simmer) and Authr was built (that paper was simmering too), one question was still hanging. Put a physical robot arm in front of an…

The UR5 is where I learned the Universal Robots stack. I had already played with MoveIt and ROS on the lab's Kinova Mico. Once I proved that I could handle a robot arm I was given access to the UR5…

The Kinova Mico is where I learned MoveIt and basic ROS. It was slow. It was janky. But I learned how to control an arm, which was pretty cool. The nice thing about the Kinova from an HCI perspective…

Okos Polip is the device-to-cloud service I built for my own hacked devices. You might be wondering why that odd name? Well okos is smart in Hungarian and polip is octopus. A smart octopus with a…

TL;DR: In 2019 I built a robotic sixth finger, named it after a Hungarian shaman, and then, during debugging, put it inside a plastic box because I had decided it was trying to get away from me. I…

Táltos is the shaman of Hungarian mythology, and one of the traits that supposedly marked someone as a táltos was being born with a physical abnormality, like an extra finger. So a Táltos-oid is a…

Part 1 was the long road out of WordPress. This is the short road onto Cloudflare Pages, and it is short mostly because Pages doesn't leave you much to do. You connect the repo, tell it the build…

In the cutover post I said that if I did my job right, you couldn't tell the blog changed engines. What I glossed over is how much of that job was actually mine. A large portion of the mechanical…

The blog you are reading is no longer WordPress. As of this week, half-built-robots is a static site built with Astro and served from Cloudflare. If I did my job right, you shouldn't be able to tell…

A cobot on a factory floor is only as good as the person programming it. The people who are good at that have been doing it for years, and most operators are not those people. There is a persistent…

Most manufacturing work was designed for a pair of human hands. Put a cobot on the line and someone has to take that work apart and decide which pieces go to the robot and which stay with the person…

Working next to a cobot means sharing a task with a machine that runs on its own for a while and then needs you, and the hard part is guessing when it will need you and for how long. During my time at…

Back in Fall 2018, I took CS 534 (Computational Photography) at UW-Madison. The term project was open-ended, so naturally my team and I decided to see if we could get a neural network to generate…

When you’re working on human-robot interaction research, there’s a surprisingly mundane problem that keeps showing up. The robot needs to know where things are. Specifically, in our case, the robot…

During my Master’s in Computer Science at UW-Madison, I spent most of my time in the People and Robots Lab working on human-robot interaction research under Dr. Bilge Mutlu. The lab had a UR3e cobot…

I found a 2D WebGL fluid simulation on GitHub’s trending page one Friday afternoon and lost about twenty minutes clicking around the canvas watching colors swirl. I forgot what I was actually doing…

Back in undergrad, when I set up the LED strip around my apartment’s living room window, I thought the little IR remote it came with was fine. Point, click, color changes. Simple. Then I lost the…

This past January (2026) my husband and I flew from the Bay Area to Tokyo for two weeks. The first week was vacation. We took the Shinkansen down to Osaka and came back up to Tokyo. I specifically put…