Society of Robots - Robot Forum

Ok so the Relife RL-UVH902 UV fast cure solder mask order has arrived and so has my order for a Relife UV curing light to cure the solder mask quickly and effectively. So now I just need to solder mask off that little trace that goes under the half bridge IC chip.

So the plan I have for the heat sinking main conductors that attach to the bottom pads of the IC chip I decided to draw up to explain it. It will be in layers. First you have the chip on the bottom facing bottom side up so the pads are exposed upwards. Then on the first attachment layer I cut out matching shaped copper plates from copper sheeting and solder that down with low temp solder paste and a soldering iron. In theory, this first layer attachment will basically just be extending the pads up past the viewing window of the DIY PCB with cutout viewing window we've made so far so that the DIY PCB we made so far and this first layer of copper plates together act as layer 1. Ideally the copper plates would be slightly proud of the printed PCB in height I think. This first layer copper plates that we are soldering onto the pads of the IC carries the current and the heat sinking to layer 2 without the need for vias. In a multi-layer PCB made industrially, vias would take the heat sinking and current to layer 2 of the board and we are just using solid copper plates instead which should be even better than vias because its solid copper instead of just via holes so more surface area than vias would offer. Now on layer 2 we can create a much larger sheet that extends out past the PCB way off the chip and that portion that extends way off the chip acts as a tab we can solder the V- wire to. It also acts as a tab we can solder our 6 strands of solder wick wire that act as heatsink fins to. Layer 2 also has a plate that brings the V+ to layer 3. For layer 3 we just attach a large sheet of copper which also extends way out past the chip and acts as a tab we can solder our V+ wire to and our heatsink solder wick wires to.

It's been 18 years, so I looked up what happened to the guy a few weeks ago. I always wondered what happened to it.

He just posted a video explaining what happened to the giant robot spider toy project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYHIJtQxbzw

Here's the center cutout now which was the last thing I needed to do before soldering down the chip. This access window will enable me to solder the main power lines to the main pads on the bottom of the chip. The circuitboard is aimed at tying into the various perimeter pins of the chip but this window is for the high power lines on a separate layer below.



I was able to cut this window out with the highest zoom setting of my magnifier visor (I think like 20x zoom?) and an exacto knife. Quite a challenge but made it happen!

Ok so I created what I'm calling the Orchestrator.py, a python code a couple thousand lines long that interfaces with chatgpt, being able to go into my codebase for chatgpt and pull sections of code out and populate my clipboard with that code and ask me to paste it in for chatgpt which I then manually do. Chatgpt outputs commands like list all sections of code in this or that file and if I copy this command, the orchestrator who polls the clipboard goes out and goes into the code file and parses out the code section names and populates the clipboard with it and tells me to paste it in to chatgpt which I then do and then chatgpt is like okay, these 3 code sections we are dealing with for today's project, pull out code section #1 - lists its name and I copy this request into clipboard and orchestrator goes out and pulls that section of code from the codebase, populates it into the clipboard, and tells me to paste this into chatgpt which I manually do. So then chatgpt fully is able to get up to date on the codebase and where we left off. Also backing up a bit, this ALL starts off for a new session in chatgpt with me pasting in a huge context dump about my various projects and the orchestrator.py and the commands it can give the orchestrator.py etc and kind of seeding its context window with what is going on. Then it begins issuing the commands to list sections of code or w/e. Next I have to manually launch the orchestrator.bin file which launches the python code of orchestrator.py which upon opening asks me what code project we are working on this session and gives a window with a list of coding projects we have ongoing. I select from that list the coding project we are doing that session. The orchestrator then takes the coding project I selected and opens up a context txt for that coding project that lists the overall goals of that project, the list of to-dos for it, the most recently completed steps, and where we left off, any constraints, any special notes or rules, any dependencies, any special files or directories the related project files are located in, etc etc. It copies this coding project specific txt extra information into the clipboard and tells me to paste that into chatgpt which I then do manually. So this way chatgpt now has overarching major context dump for all coding projects and then today's coding project specifics for that session. It is now fully equipped to be my coding copilot. The orchestrator saved me just a ton of navigating codebases and files and copy pasting all the time. That is basically its job, to be a bridge for chatgpt and I into the hard drive and the projects. My next plan for making this even more seamless that I have been working on is to make my own diy browser. This browser will then be my interface for chatgpt and will enable my orchestrator.py to tap into what chatgpt is saying to me without me having to copy output text from chatgpt into my clipboard for the orchestrator to see the output of chatgpt. The browser will communicate this output text via some method that the orchestrator.py can read. Haven't decided yet how. I think socket based client server communications tunnel is the normal way two separate programs communicate like this. Although I could just output to a txt file maybe? I have used just changing the title of a window's text as a way to have two programs talk to eachother. Sometimes high speed talking can be too laggy or buggy when talking via .txt file generation and deleting. But there might be workarounds for that. And it depends on rate of communication needs too I think as far as when bugginess kicks in.

So anyways, as far as the diy browser goes, so far it creates a socket, uses OpenSSL, creates the handshake, connects to a web server, creates get requests, downloads that request, parses some of that request, etc. So I've come a long way with it. My first server I'm teaching it to connect to is gmail. So far it will connect to gmail.com and get a 301 redirect to https://mail.google.com/mail > it detects this and it then redirects to that url. That URL then issues a 302 redirect telling the browser to go to https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=mail which is the login page for google accounts. That is where I paused for now. So it now needs to detect that 302 redirect request and close the socket and close the secure connection handshake stuff and start a fresh socket and fresh secure connection and connect securely to the account login page.

I chose gmail as a test bed starting point for the browser since one of the things I want the browser to do is act as a very advanced spam filter but more. I want it to actually go into my spam folder and follow custom rules to locate certain specific types of spam and delete it out of the spam filter folder for me. Then when I regularly look through my spam folder for anything that is not spam, I won't have as much regular and obvious complete junk mail in there to sift through to find non-spam. I know you can use a couple popular 3rd party software to interface with browsers with your desktop applications like Selenium and Puppeteer but I prefer not to get locked into any 3rd party ecosystem for this kind of thing and want to DIY this instead for MANY reasons I won't go into here. Suffice to say I've wanted a DIY browser for browser related personal AI assistant related tasks like the spam filter filter of filters thingy I was talking about before as well as many other cool projects related to browser automation and I've wanted to do it from the ground up for years for many reasons. One of which is I simply want a custom browser in GENERAL even for personal use. For various reasons I want this to supplement Chrome and Firefox and Opera and Vivaldi and Supermium etc that I use already for various things.

So anyways building your own browser is a huge job but I think its a great asset for my goals. It will play a key role in my AI for my robot being able to use the internet to do many many things like researching, learning, watching videos, training, etc. I plan to have it be a very minimal diy browser that does bare minimum html parsing and display as well as parsing and displaying Javascript to a smaller degree. It won't be a full JavaScript engine it will just do bear minimum to get the key dynamically loaded content downloaded. I do not even intend for it to display websites as they were intended to be displayed by the website developers. It will just display websites as pure text with most images removed in many cases and it will often run in headless mode which means no graphical interface at all just console outputs only in many cases. It will often be moreso just a bridge between my AI and websites than a proper actual browser that people use with their mouse and keyboard to interface with websites as a human user of websites. But it WILL enable that form of use of the internet and websites as well as a optional use of this browser. So it will be multipurpose. One thing I want for it to be able to do one day is lets say the robot is fixing one of its own pulley systems and notices the ball bearings for pulley system repair are running low on stock. It can go online and order more ball bearings and doesn't even need to ask me first. It would just use my credit card and buy it. And one day ideally it would make its own money online and use its own money to repair itself so it doesn't use my money. I'd let it have its own money for its own maintenance and business ideas although the latter would be limited and need some oversight but could be a cool realm of experimentation that could be fun. So yeah, that is just one of like thousands of potential future uses for it.

Well and since I said this much I'll say a LITTLE more my philosophy and approach behind this custom browser thing. Because I plan to run windows 7 on the robot and use it myself, refusing to upgrade to Windows 10 and GOD FORBID the notoriously and INFAMOUSLY Windows 12 NIGHTMARE that is causing mass exodus of faithful Windows users to Linux in recent times, that really affects my long term planning. By choosing to stay in Windows 7, now all browsers are going out of support and websites one by one are no longer displaying saying I must upgrade my browser. Soon extensions will stop working and all things will start to be unusable one day. So by making my own Windows 7 friendly browser now, I don't EVER have to worry about losing the ability to use Windows 7 as my daily driver. Supermium browser is a legacy windows friendly browser that IS maintained and still works on all websites but is that guaranteed to be maintained 15 or 30 years from now? Not in my opinion. Better to just roll my own now if I plan to stay on Windows 7 forever. My next operating system upgrade may never come or may be Linux or may be my own custom operating system which I already started building. But in the meantime a bare bones custom browser will potentially turn into a great thing for me.

Now alot of the diy web browser progress I mentioned here I did the work on like 4 years ago I think and there's video footage on my youtube of me making it on my youtube channel. I was just continuing where I left off on this project recently is all. Did not get a ton done yet recently but did progress a bit. And I'm HOPING that with chatgpt and the orchestrator.py's help that I can code much faster now on the DIY browser development. We'll see. I think I do code a bit faster with it so far but I am still hoping to improve there.

As far as the robot electronics, I did manage to find my hotplate with temperature control knob and a nice glass vessel I can put on the hotplate with water filling it up half way that I can heat up to 110F or w/e the ideal is for the etching solution I'm using. Then I will put the plastic earplug container I used for etching the little PCBs inside that hot water and do the etching at these higher temps. So I have everything ready for that next step. I did not start making the motorized etchant agitator yet though.