Category: Industrial Automata
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Universal Maintenance Design: Making Infrastructure R2-Accessible
How Designing for Robots Creates Better Systems for Everyone Part 3 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the previous posts, I explained why we need helper droids and traced how we lost the modular design philosophy that would have made them possible. Now I want to introduce a concept that could actually change how […]
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The Death of the Helper Droid: How Modular Design Philosophy Gave Way to Vendor Lock-in
A History of Lost Technologies and Changed Incentives Part 2 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the first post, I explained why I’m building an R2-D2 style helper droid—a universal translator for machines that can diagnose infrastructure, speak multiple protocols, and tell you what’s actually wrong in plain language. But that raises an obvious […]
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Teaching an Old Droid New Tricks: Why I’m Building an R2-D2 inspired ‘droid
Or: How a Fun Weekend Project Revealed Everything Wrong With Modern Technology Part 1 of a series on astromech droids, universal design, and the technologies we’ve lost and/or failed to develop. I’m sitting in my workshop come sitting room with an NVIDIA Jetson Nano, a tangle of cables, and an increasingly uncomfortable question: Why doesn’t […]