As someone who visits care homes regularly I really don’t see robots having much impact.

I also wonder how often they need repairing/charging/replacing over, say, a 40 year lifespan?

Let alone dealing with the emotional side of working in care homes, especially for those with the varying forms of dementia.

These jobs are the ones we should value way higher in society.

@futurebird

We experimented with a window "robot". No messing with cords, just 3d prints to mount a long threaded rod driven by a motor that lifted/pulled down the shade.
When we finally got it all rigged up the kid and I got to learn about thread pitch and how glacially slow it moved the shade. The setup was fine for a 3d printer's Z axis, not so much for a 3' tall shade.

(butterfly kicks are, at the very least, for people who are still actively training)

Yeah, remembering how a top Chinese gymnast broke her neck¹ while preparing for an impressive show like that (and was basically left to fend by herself by the government), I wonder how many children were wounded during training...

¹IIRC ? at least her spine, as she ended completely and irremediably paralyzed

@sabik @futurebird

(it's genuine hypothetical engineering, but also the context "unobtanium" was coined in...)

Bipedal balence is impressive. I'm impressed with the ankle joins. ankle and wrist like joints are hard.

Though the feet do not flex which means these robots cannot really walk the way that humans do. Foot flex is so powerful and subtile.

Most animals have that joint much higher up, what do we get by making it so short? (it's not nothing. )

All it really shows is bipedal balance

(the wu shu's all very nice but having done a little myself it's not telling me the right things about a robot to know whether it can do all the other things I learned from chinese martial arts generally)

It turns out many windows are designed to be hard to open so that ... people don't rob you. And our windows are old.

It might have been easier with newer windows, but I would need to replace all of the windows. OR make ugly 3D printed inserts that I could control. (I considered this, but it was too ... solarpunk in a bad way)

When it came to home automation I had much more luck with automatic watering systems for plants. Turning water on and off is something you can do, and it can be very powerful.

Since I'm rebooting my roof garden I'm making a new watering system now.

Automation can be very hit or miss. Some "easy" tasks are hard.

Opening a window? It's a big deal.

4/4

I thought "get a motor to open the window" was a simple matter. It was not. The best solution seemed to involve changing the whole way windows were designed, so that less expensive motors could reliably open and close the system.

A good home aid will notice that a room is stuffy and open the window. Close it when it rains. This isn't their main job function. It's just an extra thing that most "robots" can't do.

3/

But knowing nothing (this was 15 years ago) I thought "I just need to find a motor that can open and close each window and set it up with wifi and hook it into my self-built home automation system.

Do you know how HARD it is to open an window? If you want to open it the way that people do, you need a motor that does not exist. There are systems that can replace the pulleys, but they aren't cheap and installing them is no joke.

2/

I'm mostly a school teacher and hobbyist. I was very excited about home automation and one of my more naive early projects was to make it so I could open and close the windows of my apartment via the internet. Then I could make algorithms and save on AC by switching dynamically to open windows based on the wind outside, time of day, humidity and temperature.

If you know about windows or motors you are seeing the big flaw and the real problem already.

1/

@clew @futurebird

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUmlv814aJo