Steve the Robot

if somebody stumbles upon this website while this text is there, treat the text as ipsum text--it's slop. Pi 5 brain, OAK-D eyes, and a lot of vibecadding. Also: a shameless shout-out to my silicon co-pilot (hi, ChatGPT).

Background

Circa 2017, baby Steve rolled for the first time—loose wires, scuffed treads, big dreams. Extremely cute, slightly alarming, and absolutely the moment the mission creep began.

Baby Steve (2017): the primordial wobble.

2019 — breadboard years.

2021 — first tidy wiring pass.

2023 — camera era.

2025 — Pi 5 + OAK-D.

Vibecadding: draw → print → test → repeat

Vibecad = rapid, low-ceremony iteration. Sketch the contour, print the bracket, test the fit, tweak, reprint. Fewer ceremony points, faster feedback loops.

Latency-killer: a 30-minute print beats a 3-day CAD rabbit hole.
Constraint discovery: the part tells you what’s wrong when it touches reality.
Confidence compounding: many small wins > one mythical “final” design.

v1 — guessed holes; instant learnings.

v2 — slots for forgiveness.

v3 — cable relief (finally).

v4 — rotated for strength; prints clean.

Brains & Eyes: Pi 5 + OAK-D, and a saner wiring loom

Compute: Raspberry Pi 5. Vision: Luxonis OAK-D (RGB + stereo depth). Drive: TB6612FNG motor driver. Clean 5 V rail via UBECs, fused harness, common ground.

Cleaner power: logic isolated from motor supply; shared ground to banish ghosts.
Deterministic control: correct input polarity fixed the “only one direction” gremlin.
Edge depth: OAK-D handles depth on-device; Pi focuses on planning + UI.

Robot control UI with live feed and controls — Control UI — live camera, depth toggle, drive sliders, and a big red “stop being spicy.”

OAK-D depth stream — halls, corners, and the occasional chair-leg jump scare.

What worked (and what didn’t)

✅ Vibecad FTW: fitment bugs die fast when you print the problem.
✅ Shared ground: half the “mystery bugs” vanished.
✅ UI first: seeing state (and a panic stop) shortens the debug loop.
❌ Floating references: unreliable signals until we normalized grounds.
❌ Cable spaghetti: first harness drafted by a plate of linguine. Now: labeled + strain-relieved.

Future Work

Lightweight ORB-SLAM-ish pipeline with OAK-D features as priors.
Real-time point-cloud streaming to a laptop app (WebRTC/ZeroMQ → Qt/GL).
FOC/closed-loop drive for smoother low-speed torque.
Battery mgmt: smart pack + single-port charge-in-place.
Autonomy v0.1: corridor following, docking, and “fetch coffee” (stretch).
LED halo revival, because vibes.

This build absolutely had a silicon co-pilot: ChatGPT. From “why do my treads only go forward” to “decode the TB6612 pinout again,” Steve is a collaboration between a human with zip ties and a language model with opinions. I regret nothing.