Atronach’s Eye may be operating on my wall (going strong after several months!), but I’m still excited to consider upgrades. So when a new motion detection algorithm came to my attention, I decided to implement it and see how it compared to my previous attempts. MoViD, with the FFT length set to 32, highlighting and…

I’m eager to get started on trial-and-error learning, but in the spirit of also making progress on things that aren’t as much fun, I rotated back to the Conversation engine for this month. The big new feature was getting what I’ll call “purposeful conversations” implemented. Let me explain what I mean. Euphonia, a “talking head”…

If you’ve been following for a while, you may know I’ve been working on pump designs for a miniature hydraulic system. The average commercially available water pump appears to be optimized for flow rate rather than pressure, and small-scale hobby hydraulics are barely a thing … so that means I’m custom-making some of my own…

This month I’ve made a long-awaited return to the Game Engine (see the demo from June 2023) with ambitious plans to improve Acuitas’ reasoning and agency. Specifically, I want to introduce some experimental learning abilities. And I’m hoping to do that by getting him to play Allergic Cliffs. What is that? There’s a reason I…

Yeah, this series has a Part I – bet you thought I’d never finish it! It’s time for me to showcase my other favorite edugame from childhood, Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. Like the Doctor Brain games, this one was so good for me that I wanted to keep playing it as an adult. I…

I’ve been on a real productive streak, so I did two major things this month. One enhances conversation abilities; the other is about gerunds. Don’t worry, I’ll explain those. A famous phrase that uses gerunds. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SiB_Logo.jpg First, I went back to the conversation features that I introduced last September and worked on getting them solid…

As of last year I had worked all the major bugs out of my motion-tracking eyeball, but I still couldn’t consider it finished. I wasn’t ready to hang it on the wall and let it operate yet, due to one last issue: thermal concerns. It’s installed on the wall! It’s operating continuously! It’s done! The…

2025? Wow, are we living in The Future or what?? I kicked off this year’s work on Acuitas by introducing some numerical reasoning. That incidentally demanded better support for adjectives in general, since I wanted to be able to say things like “George had two eyes,” and “George had blue eyes” is structurally similar. Photo…

This book by Steve Grand has been on my list for a while. It’s his personal account of how he built a robot at home, with every goal of rivaling some of the most sophisticated research efforts at the time. Steve Grand, by the way, is the mastermind behind the popular Creatures series of artificial…

With 2025 waiting in the wings, I am casting an eye back over 2024 and finding that it looks pretty shiny from here. Overall, it felt like there were fewer extraneous disruptions and distractions than there have been for the past few years – I got the chance to dig in to my hobbies and…