Steve the Robot
On January 20, 2017 I told my friend I built a robot. He said "Once it can fetch you a beer, I will be seriously impressed."
Enter Steve–my deep dive into percieving the world robotically. How do you find a beer? How do you find a fridge? How do
Mark Zuckerberg's Building Jarvis post was one of my first inspirations at this time.
A decade later with things like SAM, and cheap LiDAR, an entity focused spatial understanding feels distinctly acheivable.
Background
There's an intense joy in pressing a key and hearing something in the physical world twich because of the code you've written. I got a raspberry pi for christmas a decade or so ago. A few years later I switched my major to computer science, and I felt like I no longer had an excuse not to work on it. I had also gotten some circuitry stuff from adafruit, so I went in the hardware direction. I pulled boilerplate code to talk to an LCD screen, an ultrasonic rangefinder, a servo. I had a little remote control bulldozer toy from my childhood with dupont connectors. Halfway through winter break I figured out that transistors weren't ideal for bidirectional DC motor control, and I found the L293D motor driver, and this tutorial for how to control motors with it. I pulled several all-nighters watching the office, and finally got it moving forward and back.
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.
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” bug.
- Edge depth: OAK-D handles depth on-device; Pi focuses on planning + UI.
LiDAR
The LiDAR pass is the next layer of Steve’s spatial awareness. For now this is a parking spot for the sensor mounting work, scan experiments, and the notes that will eventually turn into a more useful mapping pipeline.
Bill of Materials
Core components for the current Steve build. I’ll add wiring notes and PDFs here later.
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.