Half-Built-Robots: page 3

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…

July 2023, I was in Minneapolis for the Microscopy and Microanalysis (M&M) conference for my employer. After I wrapped up, my husband (boyfriend at the time) and I went to the Mall of America. First…

This was RoboGames in Pleasanton, April 2023. Practically in my backyard, since I work in Pleasanton and lived in Dublin at the time. I went with my boyfriend (now husband). I had wanted to go to one…

This was a small project right at the start of COVID-19, where I needed two Universal Robots UR3e robot arms under ROS control. It was early lockdown, so there was no way I was getting into the lab…

Bubbles wasn’t always in such a sorry state. He (originally a she) was a gift my little sister received (for Christmas or birthday, I forget which). The toy line was Hasbro’s FurReal Friends GoGo My…

It has been a few years since I did a home automation update (see my 2022 update) and a lot has changed. I moved (twice), got some new devices, have both Google Home and Alexa agents, and started work…

When I moved out to the Bay Area (California), I purchased a small KOIOS air filter to keep the wildfire smoke at a reasonable level in my (at the time) one-bedroom apartment. After a while, I…