Hello!

Hi All,

Used to be a project manager, software engineer and a couple other hats. Loved what I did. Then my heath quit on me. I find being unable to do things just because I'm mostly confined to my bed extremely annoying. So I learned Solid Works, got 3d printers, expanded my electronics lab and intend to design little robots that allow me to do what I used to be able to do, but from my bed. Beats watching TV or goofing off on the internet for the rest of my life.

My initial designs are pretty much primitive versions of what you all do here, the only difference being that they're controlled wirelessly through software on my computer, rather than by conventional remote control. And they need wireless repeaters to work properly outdoors.

Maybe I'll succeed in my goal and maybe I won't, but I hope to learn a great deal from all of you and give back a bit in return.

Welcome Eric! look forward to seeing your projects as they go along.

Welcome to the party Eric ! Be interesting to hear of your projects. Good Luck. Noel

Sounds very interesting! Are you using an arduino, Raspberry pi, something like that?

Looking forward to reading your exploits.

Welcome Eric. Just goes to show you dont have to give up in the face of adversity. Looking forward to seeing some of your projects. ATB. regards

Welcome Eric,

There are lots of helpful people on this site with a vast amount of knowledge. I live in Sydney, Australia and used to be a mechanical engineer and CAD jockey using Solidworks. I look forward to seeing some of your projects.

Paul

Welcome to the nuthouse

GRBL has some interesting 32 bit units nowadays

@Jeff Dayman - Thank you very much for the welcome, I'll be sure to share my projects. Some of them are going to be weird, but, for this forum, I don't think that'll be an issue.

@Noel Shelly - Thank you, it's good to have found this place. Only signed up after the third book on a machining topic told me to, glad I did, seems to be a really friendly place. Will do my best to return that kindness.

@Jon Lawes - Thanks for asking. The answer is... yes. I'm using Pis to operate the cameras on the robotic systems, though I have seen a few tutorials on using an ESP for that purpose. On my list to look into. My earlier designs for interfacing a robot with my keyboard used arduinos with those cheap little 2.4ghz add on boards, that did work, but I found some issues with that approach, mostly the program would lock up randomly about five feet out my front door and I couldn't figure out why, signal seemed okay but there was something it didn't like. I used to program in PICBasic and those ICs were highly reliable and more tolerant of abuse than I've found pis or arduinos to be. My long term plan is to make custom boards for the hardware control using Microchip (or atmega, I'm not picky) after I've got the prototyping done. Probably have a pi zero on board for something but I like the stripped down simplicity of a low level chip without a full linux OS for hardware control.

@Oldiron - Thanks very much for the welcome. I will freely admit that I think a lot of people would like to keep doing this kind of stuff, but then their health quits and everyone expects them to just waste away. I'd understand if it was impossible to build these systems. but, with the tech we have today, there is absolutely no reason anyone can't garden from bed, or do the dishes in bed, or cook in bed through remote robotic systems. So far as I can tell, we don't have those products not because they're hard, but because it scares people to think that, someday, they might need them so they just don't build them at all. We have quantum computers, generative AI and the ability to genetically engineer everything but a 90 year old woman can't plant a begonia in her garden from her recliner? That is the easiest thing on that list. Something doesn't add up there. I may fail, but I'll try to produce failures that are at least fun for everyone else to grin about.

@Paul Lousick - Thanks for the welcome, feel free to critique any of my work. I won't be offended and I"d appreciate your insight. I never did get to Australia. Always seemed like a neat place. Pretty unlikely I'll get there now but I guess if I ever get my robot stuff done extreme long distance ultralights have always seemed like a novel engineering challenge. Gotta dream.

@Ady1 - Thank you, I've been meaning to upgrade my CNC from the stock Chinese board it shipped with. I'll look into this. Know way less about the low end control it than I should so that will be a good opportunitiy to improve. I appreciate the suggestion.

Welcome to the Forum!

Some intersting projects to come.

Wish that I had your abilities with electronics.

Howard

@Howard Lewis - Thank you!

I'll try not to disappoint.

If you ever want advice on how to pick up more electronics I'll be glad to share. I'm not an EE, just able to build circuits that (usually) do what I want.