Attaboy!!

The Jetson Orin Nano fits like a glove.

Just designed this holder that lets you attach the camera flat cable extenders to the back of the robot's head. The extenders isolate the camera connectors and cables from any tension due to the head's bearing.

The story behind the name change www.ignaciomellado.es/blog/HF1-is-...

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

Yesterday, these brilliant high school students learned how to hack into a Mino robot! They care about price, so I'm optimizing memory usage to smooth the experience with the inexpensive Jetson Nano. A Jetson Orin Nano will still give you the premium experience, though.

Turns out you can fry a Jetson Orin Nano dev kit with the right (wrong?) short. Luckily, the availability issues they had a year ago seem resolved. Got a new one from Amazon in less than 24h. For more than those $250 that Jensen announced though.

Maker friends, a big PCB manufacturer reached out to sponsor my projects. Is this common? Interested in your experience with these sort of deals.

Turns out we could have been 3D-printing overhangs at 90 degrees all along with the right slicer. Links to paper and code in comments. Video credit: Janis Andersons.

Fellow makers, who spends 15+ minutes every now and then raiding the lab to find a lost screw driver? 🙋🏻‍♂️

It wasn't that long a day if you end it slashing 50% of model loading time.

One code base that builds on jetson nano and jetson orin nano and i love it. That's Mino's software stack.

My project is at that point when bugs in one robot come from other robots in the network. Turns out I did a bad job configuring DDS and it costed me 1 day of debugging. Who could have imagined that turning on the power in my lab had started a Jetson somewhere out of sight.

Folks, after seeing people having issues to recall the robot's name, I'm giving it a more human-friendly name. HF1 is now Mino. It will be sold by my brand-new company, Min Robotics.

Everyone talking about the dunning-krueger of managers turned swes with ai, and nobody talking about that of swes turned managers. No, throwing n agents at a problem does not automatically solve it n times faster. Brooks’ law still applies.

If dealing with ai slop wasn’t enough, we now have to suffer ceo slop.

We’re genetically programmed to belong to a group, which is not necessarily conducive to finding truth.

Good hardware is nothing without good software, so I’ve been heads down coding a module system that will ship with the robot. There’s motion, speech, camera, behavior, bridge… Each module is a container, which makes the dependency hell tractable. Modules communicate via ROS2.

It was energizing to be in the room with so many entrepreneurial, inquisitive souls building careers around making. I don’t want my legacy to be just products.

Si estás en Madrid, pásate a escuchar a Ignacio hablar sobre IA, robótica y exploración espacial. Servidor participará en el panel de discusión posterior.

If you're in Madrid, come to listen to Ignacio talk about AI, robotics and space exploration. Yours truly will participate in the discussion panel afterwards.

Currently having very little patience with hyped ai salespeople, wannabe sociopathic ceos and the attention economy in general.

Some of my most productive days as a software engineer end up with zero lines of code written.

Does deep tech just mean hardware now?

My robot runs “trainware”.

Prioritizing robot features today as launch date approaches. Project has endless possibilities and I’ll continue creating more features after shipping to early backers. Want an affordable robot you can learn from and build upon? This one’s for you. Bio or contact for more info.

What are the slots and circles on the lid of the HF1 robot? If the internal cells do not give you enough run time, these simple mechanism enables you to power the robot with virtually any 12V-19V power bank. Here's how you attach the power bank ⬇️

HF1 now supports a Jetson Orin Nano. Just finished the changes for the Orin to communicate with the robot's PCB via 40-pin header: GPIO: power management, time sync serial: comms with MCU I2C: audio control I2S: audio playback/record Here's a ROS2 node syncing time every 10s.

Ok, I’m excited about the Artemis II launch.

It seems impossible to find an interesting podcast. All I’ve heard so far are superficial points and tons of vocal fry. Suggestions please. Any topic welcome.

The next batch of robot control PCBs will likely be the final design. The current batch was really helpful to stress test at max power, pinpoint the remaining issues and prototype the fixes that are already integrated in the design. This includes powering a Jetson Orin Nano.

Came across a multiple ground issue that disappears when I probe the board with the oscilloscope. When you get your robot, don’t mind the little tv with knobs duct taped on top of it.

“how the attacker got the npm token in the first place: by injecting a prompt into a GitHub issue title, which an AI triage bot read, interpreted as an instruction, and executed.” grith.ai/blog/clineje...

Should pivot to repairing Jetsons if all this AI robot thing flops. Over time, I've reversed engineered parts of the carrier board. Here's a simple fix for dead GPIO pins ⬇️

Why are all my apps blue and green now?

Our robot’s voltage regulators passed all our validation tests this week! It’s hard to get these at once: -stable output voltage -wide input voltage range -high output power -small footprint -reasonable temperature increase The latest prototypes show them all consistently.

3D printed power button and LED diffuser. I must have done like 20 prototypes of this part alone. My son now deems it "satisfying to press" (sound on).

What scares me most about relying too much on AI coding is that I might replace talking about what I do with talking about how productive I became.

The most unexpected lesson from this week is how difficult it is to make a button that feels ok.

Silicon Valley has been exploiting the idealism of high achievers for decades. I've seen many times this sort of reaction, to the realization that the company ultimately prioritizes making money.

This newsletter could have been sent last week, right? It is from 10 years ago.

Oh, no. Another robotics company that could not secure funding. I really liked their vision of approachable humanoids.

Some device tree black magic, I2S sorcery and I2C spells later and we got audio output! (audio is a tribute to HF1's favorite cousins)

Happy Groundhog Day!

So, I was able to make the Jetson talk to the audio chip via I2C, configure the PLL and clocks of the I2S interface, power the mic and read back audio (still not reaching the Jetson). Here's the Jetson saying "hey, chip, gimme register 6" and the chip replying "Mkey, it's 0".

This is going to sound weird. I used to have a European coworker in the Bay Area who was once looking for a place to rent. He ended up at a condo called Villa Granada. I had also been looking, so I had visited the place.

Today it's audio day. My latest robot PCB has an audio codec. Let's see if I can make the Jetson interface with it over I2S+I2C. It involves tinkering with device trees, so I don't expect it to be easy, but I'm so excited for hearing HF1 for the first time!

The new motor drivers and servo feedback in the latest PCB worked like a charm! After a long battle with regulator overheating and ringing, it's nice to have a small victory. The redesigned regulator coming in the next batch of PCB prototypes will hopefully behave, too.

We ain’t Boston Dynamics, but we also got snow.