Robotics

NuttX 2024 workshop starting. Great program.

NuttX 2024 workshop starting. Great program. https://events.nuttx.apache.org/

Scientist and engineer interested in Life.

Work on (GOF)AI, Agriculture, Biology, Energy, Robotics, Space---all topics climate-aware.

Cool, a two-hour workshop tomorrow morning offered by Sony on its Spresence board, with NuttX.

Xiaomi bets strong on NuttX since 2017. Apparently millions of device use it. 51% of the commits.

A “CyberDog” run by NuttX announced for 2025. The slides suggest it the first of their robots (could not confirm).

Btw live stream here: https://www.youtube.com/live/N0O3dV6fzwI?si=t1ExFKGIeNE8SZH2

The community is pretty serious about SBOMs. Cyber security at the Europe, German, UK, US levels seem reasonable, but demanding to establish at first.

NuttX moved to CMake like one year ago (another contribution from Xiaomi, damn their serious). Surprised all major RTOS have done so too, basically after 2017–not that long ago.

And it started well: How many embedded engineers does it take to connect a laptop to an old projector?

The task was not easy. DVI to HDMI adapter? USB-A to USB-C. The real deal. That’s what an embedded dev event should be, team work.

Getting lost in the depth of an RTOS. Dizzying fun.

Curious | building robots | https://anurajrp.io/about/

@anurajenp are today’s embedded engineers on average super humble and respectful of each other? Definitely the vibe here, but can’t remember when I was doing my part.

No, he became inactive around 2020 apparently.

Are tools enough for developers, debugging, etc at large scale? According to Xiaomi engineer Neo Xu, a blatant never.

Totally agree and even worse with robotics. Think ROS error handling and debugging.

Good presentation from a small company that moved to NuttX from custom low level software for each project. Necessarily easier and more scalable. One interesting comment I did not expect: They tried Zephyr first and found it too complex to deal with.

PINE63 0x64 presented here with asymmetric cores. One 64 bits, one 32 bits, and one low power. Perhaps pretty cool base for robotics projects, in a complementary way to what we discuss at @yac’ robotics garage.

Amazing to see Lup Yuen explaining low level work with hand-written, insightful and very focused notes.

A must! But if you write as well as Lup.

Second day of the event, started well with Sony organising a hands-on workshop with Spresence and NuttX. Attractive demos, including real-time ML and even musical instrument from the eighties—8-bit love.

NuttX 7.22 running on the Moon, on LEV-2.

Spresence with NuttX was actually used first in 2018 for an orbital satellite.

Sony demonstrated inertial navigation on a toy rover. Live demo and it works surprisingly well.

Apparently the key is to use high quality IMU, but they are expensive (surely why we never got it to work well at @yak). They do it cheap on Spresense by using 16 low quality IMUs (acceleration, gyro, no magnetometer) and a secret sauce to fuse their data into way higher quality.

The orbital satellite with Spresence is RAISE-2.