How thick are they? You could maybe do something similar to coin dispensers - a spring loaded stack of cards where only one can slide sideways

I committed to writing A LOT of cards, so I made a robot to do it for me. Then I wanted to know if they were good so I sent them to a handwriting expert: youtu.be/cQO2XTP7QDw

I need your help! If you know anyone who is a forensic handwriting analysis expert who would be willing look at some interesting writing & be interviewed please DM me or email at [email protected]

Still plan to release it! Just gotta find time to clean it up and document.

If you liked my painting robot you should check this one out. It took him over a year to get it working and has some really nice results that play to the strengths of the painting process. youtu.be/09LlZhlcJTU

@oscarmayer it has come to my attention that you have a fleet of weinermobiles including a weinermini and weinerdrone. I see a big gap in your lineup just waiting to be made. I think what the world needs is a walking weinerdog. Please make #projectdachshund a reality.

That said, more accessible robot arms would advance other industries that would use them to reduce labor costs. For example having a robot arm tend a CNC machine to load parts in and out allows a single person to make parts 24/7 without hiring employees.

I don’t think they’re comparable. 3D printers allow you to make almost any part with little effort. This is insanely useful for most makers. Robot arms are neat but I don’t think many makers have much use for them like 3D printing. So, no, I don’t think it’s a big issue.

I sat down with the my old boss @MaxLobovsky and discussed my time working at Formlabs, tools and other miscellanea. Check it out here if you’re interested: youtu.be/ztW5ywbh7FU

I spent a really long time making a robot solve a 4000 piece all white puzzle so that I had an excuse to talk about software algorithms. Check it out here: youtu.be/WsPHBD5NsS0

I did it many times with smaller puzzles. First a 9 piece, the. A 45 and they didn’t have the issues that the big puzzle had.

Absolutely. I choose to do things in ways that I think are interesting and hopefully challenge me to learn / solve problems. I like to say the journey is the destination. Basically the problem to solve is just a pretext ;)

Just got done doing an interview with the Formlabs CEO (@MaxLobovsky) from my garage. Mostly talking about my time at Formlabs and digital manufacturing. You can check it out at the user event Formlabs is having this week (it’s free) summit.formlabs.com

Yeah I’m doing ransac, but the issue is mostly garbage input (the edges of pieces are often “torn” / not sharp after die cutting). Even if you get perfect scans, some pieces are cut very similarly. Like they fit perfectly if you put them together, but it’s wrong.

I tried that, but many of the edge pieces can fit in multiple locations. If you get it wrong it cascades into much wrongness in the interior.

The challenge is that due to error in image acquisition / piece cutting defects, the edge that’s most similar may not be the correct edge. Thus a simple local / greedy algorithm doesn’t work (at least for me). You want all the possible matches then do a global best fit

There’s a special kind of hash called a locality sensitive hash which unlike a typical hash tries to make similar quantities collide. They’re great for this kind of thing.

Those puzzles give me strong NP hard vibes (if you’re not using the picture)

I actually bought and tried to use a vibratory bowl feeder. It had a number of tricky problems that made it not worth it. As for sorting, its necessary to properly deal with cumulative error. If you build two disconnected islands, they generally won’t connect properly.

I thought a jigsaw puzzle robot would be a nice easy project. Nope. Although to be fair I chose to make it as hard as possible… If you want to see what I came up with, I posted a video about it here: youtu.be/Gu_1S77XkiM