Noir
Anyone who has ever fought with autoincorrect can tell you that bad automation is worse than no automation.
The Noir Switch is a meditation on how control automation should work - there and easy to use when you need it, but disappears from view into the background when you don't.
The switches, themselves, are iconic black rectangles whose borders glow when you approach and fade to black as you walk away.
Their surface is touch sensitive and respond to taps and swipes, and they have embedded low-power RADAR and electrostatic proximity sensing to be unintrusively aware of their surroundings and able to adapt to changes in occupency, activity, and ambient lighting.
Developing the Switch took so many iterations and there were so many subtle challenges along the way from figuring out how to draw offline power from a single circuit without requiring three wires to managing power factors and harmonics and Bluetoothand the RADAR.
It also required a huge amount of work on the application, cloud infrastructure, firmware, and FPGA code to make everything go while hiding all of that complexity inside of something beautiful and incredibly simple.
All of that distilled down to the switch, itself.
Flow
SILSYNC/Flow is an app for web and macOS / iOS / visionOS devices which allows for easy role-based stakeholder collaboration for product definition and project management including live / interactive design simulations using Swift Hardware, a constraint-based domain-specific declarative hardware definition language which I also developed.
It includes a task queue, hierarchial Project/Product Requirements Document designed to allow for easy agile development of arbitrary projects/products from small-scale hobbiest stuff to mission-critical enterprise-scale aerospace and medical product management.
Medulla, Ganglion, r18n, and Cerebrum
Among many other things, at Roambotics I developed several series of controller boards including firmware and VHDL/Verilog FPGA code. These boards include power distribution, various forms of motor drivers ( brushed, brushless, stepper, switched-reluctance, etc. ), inertial measurment units, USB-C, Bluetooth, WiFi, GNSS / GPS, ethernet, CAN ( FD/XL ), DDR RAM, NAND FLASH storage, constant-current LED controllers, FPGAs, embedded microcontrollers, System on a Chip microprocessors, and many other features.
Mini
Small Mini robot with CNC milled aluminum enclosure standing on two wheels aft portion of enclosure removed exposing interior frame for debugging access.
Jr Series
Junior is both a prototyping platform and development testbed for firmware and high-level software controls. Most of my work on general-purpose personal robots has been in finding ways to abstract away the hardware and make programming robots as easy as making apps for phones and the Jr. series helped me along the way there and got me a lot of practice with designing injection-moulded parts, PCBs, and wiring harnesses.
The first generation Jr won Protolabs' Cool Idea Award in 2014.
Freedom to do the human stuff.
