How the work actually went, written against myself. Each of these is a sequence of specific things that were wrong — a number I was sure about, a check that measured the wrong thing, a part that could not be taken out of the machine it was in.
They are here because the finished-object version of a project is the least useful part of it. What the Software and Machines shelves show is the result; this is the cost.
The machine is Halo, a seven-foot orbital wrapper. This page is about how it was designed: a language model drawing a seven-foot machine, running tests against its own work, and the five places that went wrong anyway. Most of the wrong ones were mine. The model is made out of the cutting files This matters more than anything else on the page, so it goes first. A CNC router needs a flat outline per part — where to cut, where to drill. A 3D model is a different thing: solid shapes you can look at and measure between. The normal way to get both is to draw the solid, then export flat outlines from it, and from then on you have two descriptions of the same machine that can drift apart. ...
A CNC mill is a computer-controlled cutter that carves a shape out of a solid block. Mine is a small benchtop machine with three axes of motion — left-right, front-back, up-down — and an off-the-shelf PC for a controller. Two pieces of software stand between a 3D model and that machine. CAM decides the toolpath: the route the spinning cutter takes through the material, and how fast and how deep it goes at every point. A post-processor then translates that route into G-code, the plain list of moves the machine reads. G-code is the only thing the mill ever sees. Everything else is a plan. ...
A backyard feeder in Ontario, watched end to end by hardware and software I built and ran at home. A camera caught each visitor; a vision pipeline worked out what it was and logged the sighting, with the species and the model’s confidence drawn straight onto the photo. The feeder has since been taken down and the parts used elsewhere. This page is what it left behind: every picture from its public log, exactly as the pipeline filed them — box, name and confidence all machine-drawn, nothing retouched. ...