Work Update for Feb 9

Intro

Hi all - Here's the work update for the week of Feb 9

Last Week's Work

A summary of all the different categories of work I got done.

Book

I moved my draft content on Django from my web page to pdf form and integrated some long-standing issues into the template. I made it possible to update the font size as well as the page size and margins better.

I finished writing up the MVP 1 part of my book and have started splitting off code into phases 2. The plan will be to incrementally add functionality between the phase 1 MVP and phase 2 final version. So far so good

Phase 3 will be pushing everything into production.

Phase 4 will be add-ons and extras that I come up with between now and then.

Meeting with publisher

I met with folks from a publisher last week to discuss publishing my textbook and came back feeling good, although there would be a lot to do if I were to turn my textbook into a trade book. Some action items from that are to reformat a chapter or two into something that would be a little bit more engaging. One of my key takeaways was that no one will be forced to read my book, unlike if it were a textbook in a course. Therefore, the flow and structure of the textbook, even if it delivers the same content, needs to be rethought to keep people engaged and to deliver on the promises that I make at the beginning of the book.

Technical work on networking

One of the things I worked on last week, which is a bit off topic from my textbook writing, was to set up a small network to develop some of my final needs for my robot deployment textbook.

A long-standing issue of communication between the Raspberry Pi iRobot Create 3 and a third-party device is that the Ethernet over USB connection between the Raspberry Pi and Create 3 is fixed and not editable from the Create 3 side. I hope to eliminate this issue so that third-party devices on a physical network, such as Ethernet to the Raspberry Pi, can communicate directly to the Create 3 by using the Raspberry Pi as a router or bridge, Exactly how to do this remains one of my challenges.

updated kids camp materials

I met with two teachers last week about running short sessions on foldable and origami-inspired robots in their schools or classes. One is a local teacher and the other would be during an upcoming trip to Puerto Rico. In one case it's 7th and 8th graders and in the other it's a wide range of ages from 6 to 15.

The cool thing about using folding and origami inspired techniques in public facing kids' events is that you can show kids how to fold mechanisms before you can teach them the math and engineering concepts behind what they're doing. Robotics is a great way to draw kids into STEM, but even more so, being able to use arts and crafts tools and materials is a great way to bring robots into the classroom.

In the past I have used the ESP32 along with servos to control the motion of the mechanisms that we make. Depending on how much work I do in advance, I can prepare the ESP32 for coding in Python, which many middle and high school students have already started to learn. Or if the programming tools that are available is unknown, or if there's less time, I can load the ESP32 up with a web-based interface and show kids how to interact with the servos through a web page I've built.

So to prep for that, I updated my parts list for my foldable robotics camp. This has been run as either a 2-3 hour workshop or as a 35-hour kids camp in the past. My parts list is sized for 15 kits. Each kit comes with a servo, and the total is $300, or $20 / kit for the robotic essentials. Depending on how you want to run it, you can split into teams with one microcontroller and 3-4 servos, with a team of 3-4 sharing the coding responsibilities

You can find the updated list here.

If you're interested in setting up a kids camp, please reach out to me.

This week's work

This week will be abbreviated and I won't be able to do that much. I plan on writing as much as I can on phase two and it would be great to solve the networking challenge, but I know those things take a while.

• I hope to take a crack at some of the edits I discussed with the publisher during my travel
• I would like to update my notes and slides on foldable robotics
• I really want to work on some of the longer-lead items in my web development pipeline.

I will be traveling in the second half of the week, so let's see how much I get done.