Neurobot-1000 3d model project

[ruby lagoon]

For now though, teflon membrane is a simple solution

[night tartan]

nice idea. I like it. For now it could work

[opaque quartz]

i just realized, that vid showing tentacle movement could be used for a tongue; Wire pulleys maneuvering flat plates to curl in three dimensions

i'm fairly sure that's how the human tongue works; Four muscles connected together

when one contracts, it pulls the other three diagonally towards it

[night tartan]

Could be cool. a tongue would allow her to do funny expressions sometimes

[opaque quartz]

yeah fr

[opal bane]

sticking her tounge out when vedal turns his back after saying something

[ruby lagoon]

If tongue then where speaker?

The tongue is used for a lot of mouth sounds, but if there was actually a speaker producing a voice from the back of the mouth, the tongue would interfere with that. It could make some noises harder to make or easier though.

[opal bane]

maybe stick it just under the tounge?

[ruby lagoon]

A small speaker in the mouth may be fairly weak too, but a larger one in a cavity in the body with a tube going to the mouth could be much larger and more audible

[opaque quartz]

just use speaker imo

i don't trust today's material science to produce viable sounds and imo it's beyond me really

[opal bane]

give her actual vocal chords fr

[opaque quartz]

a voicebox and proper cheek deformation is required and even state of the art still sounds haunting

[ruby lagoon]

less material science and more if the AI can handle it. I'm pretty sure small transformers could, but it's a lot more work

[opaque quartz]

HMMMMMM

if we can find the right material and i somehow replicate EVERY muscle, then it could work, but that's a stretch

[ruby lagoon]

Honestly, maybe we should create multiple neuro versions?

[opaque quartz]

yes

[opal bane]

do not reccomend

[opaque quartz]

not concurrently

i want to make versions

[ruby lagoon]

first neuro version should be the simplest most MVP version

That way we can keep feature creep out of the initial stuff

[opaque quartz]

potentially neuro will be around longer than you or I will be alive, so we have a long time

[ruby lagoon]

No teflon membranes or massive speakers in the first version

[opaque quartz]

yeah so long as it runs im satisfied

i'm thinking that a lot of what we're discussing rn, we'll look back on with hindsight as being suboptimal, but that makes me excited for the future

idk what we're doing wrong rn but in future versions we'll be able to correct faults and iterate

very exciting

[night tartan]

We will never know what's wrong till we build her somehow. And even then, we will miss something till she runs. And even if something doesn't fail, there's always room for improvement

[ruby lagoon]

Gotta make sure our ability to make stuff increases over time, so that should mean making tools or getting good bases or libraries that can be used for general stuff

[opaque quartz]

good point

laying good groundwork will help us improve our craft

[ruby lagoon]

So, if we use an engine, we should record how well it works, battery configurations, etc.
Maybe youtube idk

[opaque quartz]

make it easier at least

[ruby lagoon]

ye

[opal bane]

or in the roof of the mouth if it doesnt mess with the eye mechanisms

she needs at least some level of speaker

[opaque quartz]

yeah

probably back of throat

[opal bane]

then the tounge would get away if we are going to add one

[opaque quartz]

oh how big/loud is the speaker? Tongue usually attaches in the front of the throat so i was thinking we could use the back of the throat, nestled into the skull

[opal bane]

ah idk

[opal bane]

im just parroting sim here

[night tartan]

Probably doesn't need to be that big, the main problem with sound quality is... (Well... it's another world that we could talk for ages) well... size of speaker, shape of the back of the speaker and direction of it.
If it doesn't sound like 2 dollar headphones.. we're probably good

[ruby lagoon]

...maybe a speaker air-sac connected somewhere in/around the mouth area by a tube isn't a bad idea...

[opal bane]

if we got neuro her own vocal chords she could have her own voice for real

V4 voice lets gooo

[opaque quartz]

nice idea

[night tartan]

Heck! That skeleton style looks crazy good!

[ruby lagoon]

O, that's kinda cool: https://www.sideshow.com/collectibles/mark-i-endoskeleton-molecule8-903050

I think it's a male skeleton though

[opaque quartz]

it likely is

[night tartan]

Jesust! It was on sale?!

[opaque quartz]

we wouldn't want it

[fossil drum]

that exo was cheap as fuck

[night tartan]

To be fair, it was an action figure to scale. so... it's just a collectable

[opaque quartz]

I've been abalyzing all commercial robots and i'm noticing that the eyes are the largest hurdle that people have with uncanny faces, followed by skin slackness and bad proportions

so my priority must be on the eyelid mechanisms and alignment

[fossil drum]

true

[opaque quartz]

a big part of it is also complexity in the eye movements

lack of tracking leads to a dead expression

too much with a dead face, leads to a predatory expression

[rugged skiff]

Yeah, facial expressions are generally hard to get right for humanoid robots.

That animatronic head made by Matt Denton posted earlier did pretty well at it with the eyes though.

[opaque quartz]

yeah. Seems like beleivable expression goes hand in hand with eyelid tech

another problem with the robots is that the skin material always bunches up unnaturally when it's making expressions. We can avoid this by abstracting it away

[rugged skiff]

I’ve seen people struggle more with the mouth honestly. 99% of the time the mouth movements look uncanny.

[opaque quartz]

for me the mouth situation is solved

in theory

[rugged skiff]

In theory

I think the NaVi animatronic comes closest to achieving natural mouth movements.

[opaque quartz]

i like their choice to use individual motors to stretch the skin where the muscle would bulge or pull on it, it makes it very reactive and lifelike

i don't like their proportioning or their treatment of the angle of the mouth though

[rugged skiff]

Yeah

[opaque quartz]

As we can see, six muscles on both sides of the face, so 12 in total, pull on the angle of the mouth, and this causes it to be 'extended' and bulged outwards under the skin in a healthy face

[night tartan]

That's... that's a lot of movement. No wonder why it's so easy to mess up an artificial face

[opaque quartz]

This is a very exagerated example, but see how the muscle mass and tension pulls it out sideways? Each of those muscles is connected to a certain type of expression, so it flexes a lot on a healthy individual: Sideways for satisfaction, upwards for a grimace, diagonal for happy, downwards for sad, etc

it's even more pronounced on males

[rugged skiff]

Yeah not a lot of people get it right, the newest Disney Audio-Animatronics are the closest I’ve seen. There’s also Ameca but that’s uncanny as well.

[opaque quartz]

i don't understand why nobody emphasizes it. It's a robot so we can afford to overemphasize health indicators and make people associate the robot with being healthy

they need to hire sculptors

people who can create a face in any expression at any angle artificially

anyway my plan is to manipulate these areas of the face the way the body does it, using motors pulling cables

i'll try with an abstracted version first without skin, to see if i can get that to look passable

i probably won't go for skin if i don't need to, as it's another source of dissnance

people can tell when the skin doesn't move right

these are all the key expression muscles

[night tartan]

sounds pretty good. I hope you find the space for all of the motors required. It sounds like pain to plan out all

[rugged skiff]

Yeah, I want to learn how to sculpt in silicone but it’ll probably take me a good number of years to become proficient enough. I mostly just sculpt in clay.

[opaque quartz]

fr i might need to embed them into the skull itself

[ruby lagoon]

I feel like the face needs to have skin

idk how you can have a face without skin

[opaque quartz]

i think if we do it right, we can use metal plates that have the dimensions of skin, this will make it look like a moving sculpture

[night tartan]

Heck! That's an amazing skill already!

[ruby lagoon]

I saw something like that. It looked freaky tbh

[opaque quartz]

i wouldn't want gaps like it had

[ruby lagoon]

No, not the avatar thing. I saw something way more detailed online... if I could find it...

[opaque quartz]

this kinda look

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, that has skin though

[rugged skiff]

That seems like it would be even more uncanny

[opaque quartz]

we'll have to see how it turns out

[ruby lagoon]

how horrifying

[night tartan]

Whoot? "Living skin"? Is this organic skin?

[rugged skiff]

I was going to post this as a joke. Turning her into a cyborg would be kind of weird.

[rugged skiff]

Yeah they grew skin cells and put it on a robot

Literal terminator-esque cyborg.

It’s kind of gross though tbh. Idk.

[marsh harbor]

i’m not an engineer and i’m enjoying the project but i’m bothered by the age and height evaluations of Neuro

[night tartan]

Yeah... is like... on one hand... my mind is like: SKIN FOR NEURO! YEESS! But... on the other hand... needs way more polish, probably.

[rugged skiff]

There’s the risk of the skin rotting and that would be really really nasty.

[opaque quartz]

the head height is based on measurement against real life human heads in the second row as well

[rugged skiff]

Yeah, she would need to constantly bath her face in amino acids so that it doesn’t rot off.

[night tartan]

Gotta feed the skin with food, oh god! And something would need to regenerate dead cells sounds like a nightmare

[opaque quartz]

it needs to look natural in a human environment

[rugged skiff]

Yeah I honestly agree

[opaque quartz]

i'd have to shrink the head to age her up

current head to body ratio matches 9yo

[rugged skiff]

Depends on the art style

[opaque quartz]

i've found that the head's a bit too wide as well, so i'll be narrowing it a bit

[rugged skiff]

Some anime have adult characters with big heads

[rugged skiff]

Yeah like I said, it would be gross.

[night tartan]

I always thought neuro's most "accurate" height was 145cm, but, this is an anime character and every vtuber says, compares and zooms their character however they like, and we don't even have a "cannon" height in place so...
if 121cm matches her head to body proportions... good for me. It maches more her personality too.
She's childish and looking like a 12-13 year old is danger territory of teenager and a puberty body she doesn't have.

[ruby lagoon]

Finally found the robot head: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/head-of-robot-tima-0a21c1001aeb4499a04099447fc16823

[opaque quartz]

ew im not gonna do that rest assured

[marsh harbor]

i don’t necessarily think it’s safe to make her too young however, both because of Neuro herself and other reasons

[ruby lagoon]

Honestly doesn't look that bad compared to a lot of other robot heads

[rugged skiff]

She does act around 12-13 most of the time tbh.

13-14 maybe

[opaque quartz]

it has some aspects to it that i like, that being the flat metal plates covering exposed internals without needing creepy skin

[rugged skiff]

With ADHD

[night tartan]

Oh gosh... yeah... ADHD sama...

[night tartan]

Also true. It's... a delicate balance...

[ruby lagoon]

It's also a 3D model you can download and has CC Attribution license

[rugged skiff]

Part of why she’s relatable to me

Also we need to consider that Neuro will probably mature by the time this is made. Vedal talked about her being serious enough to organize her own collabs. She probably won’t be an immature baby AI forever.

[night tartan]

Very very good point and that's a pretty hard dilema. Either we ignore this fact and we stick to her design proportions (which would make sense) or re-scale the body so it doesn't look too weird or even redesign her body to be more "mature" but I don't like the idea of entering that territory.
(People probably want to see neuro as how she looks now)

[rugged skiff]

Yeah, I was thinking maybe decide on the body shape after her new V4 model comes out, so we could get a better idea of how she’ll change over time. Then again I think the people working on this might get bored, I feel like 4’8 is a safe bet, still shorter than most people but it won’t be too jarring if she matures.

[night tartan]

V4 model Evil hasn't got the V3 model, yet, that's too much copium

[rugged skiff]

Yeah that’s assuming this project is still around.

Like I said, people might get bored.

[night tartan]

Is... it's very posible this project stays. I always thought of neuro getting her humanoid body not a matter of "if", but as a matter of "when". This project just gives me the light and the confirmation that, neuro humanoid is... closer than we all thought.

[rugged skiff]

Realistically, her first humanoid body will be from Ellie.

[opal bane]

of course

[night tartan]

True. And that's good because she needs to learn how to walk with two feet so, if ellie gets the green light and does it first, neuro has a chance to train on a what will probably be a 3D printed humanoid

Instead of failing to the ground hundreds of times with ours (700 fuel refuels later...)

[fossil drum]

hahahahaha

[night tartan]

Anyways, time for bed for me. Keep cooking. This is getting lots of progress

[fossil drum]

i wouldnt say a lot

we are still in the 0.(0)%-0.(9)% territory

but its going steadily

[opal bane]

which i have a hard time beliving

[fossil drum]

that we are so low?

[opal bane]

i think we're at least 5% in

[fossil drum]

i mean

same here

but yk

thats what the bossman said

[opal bane]

really we're probably closer to 10%

though that may be a tad optimistic

[opal bane]

I'm getting adds for robots now thanks guys

[ruby lagoon]

You're welcome.
Any good ones?

[opal bane]

idk i skipped it

[opaque quartz]

should we post progress notes some time soon?

not sure how we should format it, since it's not like we have an update channel

[ruby lagoon]

Gotta find the sites with better ads

[ruby lagoon]

That might be a good idea. I think everyone would need to add something to a doc about what their progress was though. I know I mostly worked on a gui and math, but idk about everyone else's

[opaque quartz]

google doc?

[ruby lagoon]

Google doc might be the best for formatting. Idk how else to do-- ah, yep

[opaque quartz]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tviNW9GpNmZhO2pqJLebRfayhfRYGw4r1T3Ncf5c9SY/edit?usp=sharing

ping me when you need edit perms

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, I usually comment. However I could use some perms

ah, nvm wait no im confused

[opaque quartz]

seems like i can'y give specific people perms

[ruby lagoon]

Usually I just open up commenting to everyone instead of just viewing, then I can accept or reject comments

[opaque quartz]

done

[fossil drum]

@opaque quartz why is progress only counter from 25th of this month

[opaque quartz]

started recording progress at that point

old stuff would require trawling through chat and also, some was a jumble of private research that i don't know the specific times for

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, I didn't realize there were more pages... Guess we'll need a table of contents.

The auto-gen table of contents follow headers. So ctrl+alt+1 or ctrl+alt+2 to make headers will help it.

[opaque quartz]

oh nice

i might add a basic summary of previous progress for newcomores

also lets ping a mod for a pin

[ruby lagoon]

(I might have over-engineered this one a little bit...)

[opaque quartz]

Ok done on that document

[opaque quartz]

is that trillions of rpm?

[ruby lagoon]

No, it's a really precise fraction estimating a gear ratio of 2/pi, (here I'm entering the inverse gear ratio, so pi/2)

[opaque quartz]

nice

@ruby lagoon we should probably order the document in terms of dates

that way people click the date to find progress by everyone every day

feel free to smoosh your progress in with mine

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, so date should be top-level, not author

I don't think I can organize my stuff by date too much, so I guess it will all be today

Also I don't know if I'll update that doc every day, maybe every week though

Ok, how about now?

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, you have to press ctrl+alt+1, ctrl+alt+2, ctrl+alt+3, etc. for the table of contents to catch the dates/people, not just bold

[opaque quartz]

ty for your formatting help

[ruby lagoon]

yw

[opaque quartz]

looks good

[opaque quartz]

doesn't have to be often, just whenever you feel like it. The resource is only there to keep people up to date on progress

you can go several weeks if you like

[ruby lagoon]

I'm just going to put all my contributions down for today

[opaque quartz]

aye

might end up shifting it to bunching up all the changes for a week into one header

once we have a week's worth at least

since it seems to work well for the first header

[ruby lagoon]

sounds good

Wait... I have a github for my work: https://github.com/SimLeek/freecad.actuators/commits/master/

[opaque quartz]

ty for the link

[ruby lagoon]

Yw

[spare vector]

Lookup the engine cycle for it

[night tartan]

What is that price?! This is the expensive ingredient to glow fuel! And that's just for 1 mere little!
(The mix required is 5-20% of this so, this bottle either gives us 20 or 5 litters of fuel)

[opaque quartz]

technically we don't need to add it for the engine to run properly

a standing idle should use way less energy than the engine provides even with less performant fuel

just methanol + a tiny percentage of oil is all the engine requires

[night tartan]

oh. Then maybe it could work? Okey. We'll have to test if the engine doesn't break or something (Or it even provides the necessary energy).
Otherwise, we could switch to a gasoline engine. But we could consider that after the model gets more progress to see if we even have the space for it.

The smaller I found is still the NGH GT9-PRO engine. I tried to find smaller ones but almost all of them are vintage collections.

[opal bane]

It's been said already but if we're using drone engines we probably need to make sure there's plenty of heat dispersal

[night tartan]

Yeah... or find a way to water cool it. Especially an engine designed for planes where wind is... well... very much guarantied

[opal bane]

We could circulate it around the body to let it cool off... Wait those are just blood vessels

If we use liquid coolant we'd also get a decent amount of body heat as a byproduct

[opaque quartz]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cooling

an interesting read

the main thing i'm worried about with water cooling is the possibilities of leaks, since a full tubular distribution system would get yanked around a lot

[opal bane]

🔥 accidentally on purpose recreating bodily systems🔥

[opaque quartz]

we could have the water cooling be segmented but that seems complicated plus we'd need more pumps

also we have to consider where the pump would be placed and how it works

https://www.watercoolinguk.co.uk/cat/Pumps-and-Accessories_77.html

[night tartan]

yep. Most reliable pumps are PC pumps or... fish tank pumps... (Actually, fish tank pumps are really bad)

[opaque quartz]

i have to wonder about the danger of a leak when dealing with so many watts with high voltage and current

[opal bane]

If we can magically get the operating temperature to be around 98 degrees (farenheight) we're golden

[opaque quartz]

https://electricove.com/electrical-safety-tips/water-and-electricity-safety/dangers-of-water-and-electricity/

[opal bane]

Electrified water is a great self defense method

[opaque quartz]

i wonder if there are any red synthetic fluids lol

[night tartan]

there's colorant for fluids and are compatible with pc cooling. So yes, we can have "blood"

And there's also non conductive "water". One of them is mineral oil. Some of them are used to fully submerge pc's in liquid

[opal bane]

Neuro: become human is realllll

[opal bane]

Heck ye

[night tartan]

It's calling for us

[opaque quartz]

😂

[opal bane]

Of course we should consider the efficiency of the coolant rather than just "ooh we should give it blood!"

[opaque quartz]

on a more serious note we don't want to use any coolants that contain dyes since that always complicates matters

[opaque quartz]

i'm thinking we can run a network of tubes around the hottest components to circulate the heat

the longer the tube, the less likely it'll spring a leak because there are less joins

[opal bane]

I was thinking of more the coolant liquid itself

Of course nothing dyed

[opaque quartz]

so unironically it'd be useful to design some sort of unbroken network of one tube which doesn't restrict ROM

[opaque quartz]

ohhh

yeah we want to choose the best rated, least toxic, and least conductive, affordable option

[night tartan]

uups. I didn't know that. The dyes i know are added after the coolant. Maybe some pc ones are better than this (I never water cooled in my life)

[opaque quartz]

hopefully

lol

[night tartan]

Another thing to search I guess.

[opaque quartz]

https://www.amazon.co.uk/XSPC-XS-EC6-CL-Non-Conductive-Coolant/dp/B008PA1G00

this one's the clear version without dyes

non-toxic, non-corrosive, non-conductive

bro this bot is on my case

😂

[night tartan]

long link: essaying

[opal bane]

She's watching your career with great interest

Also one of the longest links I've ever seen

[opaque quartz]

same

[opaque quartz]

@prime rose pin pls 🥺

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, I think those links sometimes contain tracking information. You can just remove everything after the B008PA1G00 part, including the ref, and it should still work

[opal bane]

Oh great moderator of neirocord, hear my plea, please grant us the mighty pin of organization

[night tartan]

Okey, so... regarding colored coolant. It can work. There's just one problem and that is water cooling itself.
First of all, maintenance is required. Just like dust builds up in your fan after some time, a water cooled system needs some maintenance after some years of running. Maybe like 10 or so.

The main thing to watch out on water cooling is metal mixing.
If any fitting or anything on our system uses different metals, there can cause corrosion. And that's something you can try and will work till a year later when something corroded.

If we make sure that our pumps/distributors use the same metals for their fittings, we shouldn't have much problems, even with dye.

(Gotta check that mayhems coolant, one second)

[ruby lagoon]

I mean there's the known physics you always want to consider before doing stuff, and then there's costs of fuel in different countries, noise, etc., that you didn't even know to consider. We should record the former in design and the latter in testing.

[ruby lagoon]

Oh right. Galvanic corrosion is definitely important with liquid cooling. It has to be either aluminum or copper, but not both. (Otherwise you're accidentally making a voltaic pile battery)

[opal bane]

Accidental additional power capacity!

But no that sounds like a bad thing

[night tartan]

It is. Especially because it happens so slowly

[ruby lagoon]

Yea, I didn't even think of the battery part until now. I guess you could get some nasty electrical differences if you used a lot of metals

[solid schooner]

I just realised Neuro could become an alcoholic depending if it counts as fuel. xDD

[opal bane]

It would likely murder the engine but she probably could

[night tartan]

Methane is alcohol based so... probably counts?

[opal bane]

She doesn't have a liver so she'd just explode

[solid schooner]

In the future they'll be adverts of this is what alcohol does to your engine

[ruby lagoon]

fats and oils also burn pretty well, so if she had a filter like teflon she could eat fast food as well
Fast food and alcohol = robot food

[opal bane]

Let's leave that for 2000 shall we

[ruby lagoon]

fair

[night tartan]

We could also just use colored tubing. Regardless... it's not gonna bee seen and, with metal skin, it's not like neuro is gonna get cut anytime soon.

[night tartan]

Lel. She could go to greegs, finally

[opal bane]

But... But the humanlike facade!

[night tartan]

True, true, true.

The immersion!

[opal bane]

I love this thread

We're giving a robot blood

[night tartan]

The coolant dye can probably hold up with some additives But i have no clue about that

[opal bane]

There were ideas to have a storage tank for engine exhaust so she can offgas

Aka fart

[night tartan]

to be fair, would be a funny excuse for her to go to the toilet (RIP for the toilet)

[solid schooner]

Why does robot blood have to be red? We can just ask neuro what colour she'd like

[ruby lagoon]

Rainbow blood!

[solid schooner]

RBG GAMER BLOOD!!

[night tartan]

Good point. In Detroit become human is blue. So... yeah, why not?

[opal bane]

Vedal having to buy 500 flavors of coolant

[opaque quartz]

ideally the coolent used would be one with minimal corrosion and metal mixing

liquid cooled seems like the way to go due to the small space meaning we can't just stick fans everywhere and still reach the internals

We can probably give neuro a badass central fan or something, like ironman

[ruby lagoon]

Heh, mix the speaker sac with the liquid cooling so Neuro can breathe out hot air

Maybe the engine exhaust too

[opaque quartz]

huh that's actually a brilliant idea

[ruby lagoon]

Biomimicry ftw!

[opaque quartz]

brb writing this down

[night tartan]

That's genius

[opaque quartz]

trying to research the chemical content of the emissions

formaldehyde is pretty toxic

https://www.methanol.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Safe-Handling-Manual.pdf

[night tartan]

Yikes, that sounds rough

263 pages on how to handle methanol safely HOLY!

[opaque quartz]

in terms of emissions it seems more attractive than a lot of other fuels

for handling, it seems quite dangerous though

maybe we should be looking at alcaho- i mean ethanol rc engines?

it's only 30% less powerful than gasoline, which isn't as low as i expected

https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?804234-Can-Ethanol-Be-Used-In-Model-Engines

yes and the safety factor

both fuels produce quite safe byproducts but have differrent toxicities and power outputs

everywhere i look says that you can swap out the methanol fuel for ethanol in rc engines

i wonder if glow plug engines are different

[opaque quartz]

seems like we'd need an engine built for ethanol or mcguyver our own glow plug setup

ty vanorsigma

[night tartan]

I'll search for it. It's harder because the pages don't directly tell you fuel usage. Most of them use "glow fuel" as name.

[opaque quartz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_qFvXr7ZAQ

ngl sounds like farts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxLEL08SP3c

[opaque quartz]

seems like it. I think the standard is using glow fuel for the glow plugs, wheras niche speciality ethanol glow plugs have been developed to facilitate differrent fuel use

[ruby lagoon]

Honestly, I still like Stirling engines: https://youtu.be/YCjwlSX-tsY?t=1567

Also if you search mini stirling engine they're ~20$-30$

Probably not big enough to fuel much though, might power batteries a bit, idk

[opaque quartz]

so long as the hp of the engine is greater than the hp used in a standing idle or walking gait, the fuel storage doesn't matter as we can pour in fuel on the move as needed until the batteries are charged.

so the question is if we can buy or machine one with the necessary hp

as far as i know, nitro engines are the best power to size/weigth ratio available but the fuel is extremely toxic to handle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7q0w75ZXlQ

[ruby lagoon]

True, but I think it's fine if we consider rest=recharging batteries. That way there can be fuel still burning in the engines, and it just slowly powers the batteries from 10% or so back to 100%

Then the engines only need to be... maybe 2/3 as powerful

[opaque quartz]

that's a good point

maybe we can machine a stirling engine designed to run on ethanol then

it would only need to provide a fraction of the power like you say

[ruby lagoon]

ye

Engine sounds just gotta go on all night

[opaque quartz]

if she's on 24/7 then yeah

she could plug in when she's at home though

i think one of the benefits of the engine is the ability to recharge in random places in the outside world

she only needs access to some kind of high purity ethanol

and a place to rest up for a bit

ideal power output would be enough to let her walk places slowly, but if we can't do that, idling or sitting is fine too

YOOOOO

I just realized we can repurpose the waste heat from the water cooling system to power the stirling engine

so any inefficiencies in the gearbox and motors can be sent back into the system as future power

i think with this in mind, stirling engine is the way to go

[ruby lagoon]

Hmm... can work when no fuel, but while that will add some efficiency, it won't actually power the robot because that would be a perpetual motion machine

I wonder how much it would improve the total efficiency though

[opaque quartz]

yeah it only saves on power through re-using waste

it all comes from the fuel

it wouldn't be 100% efficient either due to radiation of heat into the environment when not captured by the stirling engine

in fact ironically, doing it this way might lead to use needing to thermally insulate the tubes in order to capture as much waste heat as possible instead of losing it to the outside air

i was planning on leaving them exposed for better heat dumping

[ruby lagoon]

I think liquid cooling tubes are normally thermally insulated actually. That is they're made out of insulating materials.

[opaque quartz]

nice

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, yep, PTFE is fairly thermally insulating

[opaque quartz]

not only are stilring engines energy efficient, they're also space-efficient

[ruby lagoon]

I mean, if you want a tube shape... though I guess you could have multiple tubes and make it look more like a normal engine

[opaque quartz]

true but it's very narrow

[ruby lagoon]

true

[opaque quartz]

we can dump the heat of the lithium ion batteries into it as well

for the water cooling, i say we enclose the stirling engine's reservoir in a larger reservoire that the cooling system pumps to

[ruby lagoon]

Tbh, I was thinking of saving liquid cooling anything until we got some new manufacturing methods, like a ton of robot arms working together, or micro-robotics. However, if there are a small amount of components that make a ton of heat, then it could be worth it there.

[opaque quartz]

true

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhApxzQJBJ0

seems doable tbh

this is awesome

gonna write this down brb

[ruby lagoon]

Huh. Friction is more important than I thought

[opaque quartz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsSDm2NRIlc

[spare vector]

YES. Do not ignore friction in practical physics or mechanics. That's how heat, wear, and other problems occur. But that's also why lubricants exist.

[opaque quartz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggcjbE1_ra0

[ruby lagoon]

No, that's obvious.
I mean I didn't think a bit of extra friction would completely ruin the Stirling engine designed in the "Stirling engine development for cogeneration" video: "The relatively small friction differences [...] resulted in power differences of almost 300 watts" That implies Stirling engines may be better or worse mainly depending on how much we can lower friction.

[night tartan]

Those engines sound cool, but they need a heat source to run. Are we looking to use ethanol as a main heat generator?
(Is impossible that the heat of the batteries is enough, right?)

[opaque quartz]

yeah

the reason to use ethanol is that it's an external fuel source seperate from the batteries and can be carried like a water bottle

this saves space in the robot

[night tartan]

that's true. We can't relly on batteries for everything. We're still on the same track, but. How we're going to make ethanol... burn?

[ruby lagoon]

We can't relly on batteries for everything
I mean, we can, actually

[opaque quartz]

i was thinking we could have some sort of furnace/burner touching the piston of the engine, supplied by an oxygen pipe

we could use entirely batteries but in that case, neuro would be forced to recharge and woudn't be able to exist indefintiely outside of Vedal's lab

[night tartan]

That would be realistic... but sad... she would still be linked to a goddamm cable...

[ruby lagoon]

For charging. There are fully electric cars.

[night tartan]

True. But not enough charging stations

[opaque quartz]

I wonder how much energy is used for throttling vs gained through pressure differentials of cooled vs heated liquid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NwxMyqUyJw

since the pump would need to be powerful enough to push the liquid through the throttle

[opal bane]

Something something Spherical chickens in a vacuum

[opaque quartz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJRfSropnA

https://www.refractorymetal.org/list-of-metals-that-can-withstand-high-temperatures.html

[opal bane]

Seeing this without any visible context is terrifying

Did we find space for the death beam

[opaque quartz]

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

[opaque quartz]

there should be space. This video demonstrates that with air flow, the direction of heat transfer can be focussed into one area, which might help our efficiency if the airflow can be achieved without wasting energy - for example by capturing wind

However i'm not sure if this makes any difference to just containing the entire assembly in a furnace

does the increased oxygen add energy to the system, or does it simply turn the existing potential energy into heat energy faster?

[opal bane]

I'm not sure if my joke was completely mistranslated or i should be even more afraid

[opaque quartz]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016236110000517

ok it turns out that the more air we feed into the burn chamber, the more efficient the burn. It doesn't add energy but it does let us use more of the available

[solid schooner]

Honestly, be afraid.

Do realise that if this actually works
Militaries would actually like this..
And whilst we could say no as much as possible, the fact is, it could be done which means money gets spent on developing their own ones...

If this ever does become real, it is only a Matter of time before humanity sticks a weapon on it, and that's just how it is sadly

[opaque quartz]

the intensified flame can be directed onto the heated piston so that we lose less of it to the environment

[solid schooner]

Remember

Nerf or nothing

[opaque quartz]

lol

https://www.iraqoaj.net/iasj/download/b76954875fd4e57b

[opal bane]

Our little neuro going off to war...

I'm sorry for the other side

[opaque quartz]

we should be aiming for very little fuel but high amounts of oxygen in order to have the best burn efficiency for the sterling engine. We can probably maximize efficiency by shrouding the hot piston in a graphite shell that's heated by a burning ethanol torch

[solid schooner]

Wdym off to war...
She's the general

It's us being shipped

[opal bane]

Do remember that she needs to be cool enough on the exterior to interact with people without first degree burns

[solid schooner]

Or for that matter, pretty much anything else

What's the human temperature for touching things? It's canny hot, but like, not fridged cold

[opaque quartz]

fr we're going to have to pass the watercooling system along the exterior of the burn chamber

[opal bane]

I feel like we can get away with a maximum of 110 degrees exterior before it she becomes unconfortable to the touch

[night tartan]

We're not like 37ºC? Or I'm missing something

[solid schooner]

Please mention the units you are using btw

You have British people here

[opal bane]

Farenheight

Which is.. 40? C

[solid schooner]

Right... Yeah, as 110 c.. man that's something else xD

[opaque quartz]

ideally the water cooling keeps her perpetually at a nice human body temperature

[solid schooner]

Give or take I guess

[solid schooner]

But also we have to take into account when she's on load and how hot it'll go, or if on load that's how much it gets up too

[night tartan]

Well... what do humans do to coll themselves in hot summer? time to go shopping

[opal bane]

The neuro must absolutely be huggable

[solid schooner]

The question is how many gallons of water neuro is going to pour on her and how it'll affect her systems xD

She does have to be rainproof

[night tartan]

Oh, I was thinking more of like, going inside a shopping center where the air conditioner is at full blast on summer

[opal bane]

As long as there's no gaps in the skin she can probably swim.. right?

[opaque quartz]

very true, i almost forgot that

we need to figure out how to keep her waterproof

[solid schooner]

The swimming in question...

She might be able to walk on the sea bed, but swim?? Definitely not xD

[night tartan]

Atri levels of enginiering

[solid schooner]

Humans have buoyancy
Air that let's us float
Errr a robot is a massive hunk of metal..

I mean boats can swim but she ain't a boat xD

[opal bane]

Boats float based on how much water they displace

[opaque quartz]

for rain

[night tartan]

Cute

[solid schooner]

🔥 looks highly flammable

[opaque quartz]

it'd probably get in anyway

maybe we seal the joints?

what fabrics are hydrophobic

[opal bane]

https://tenor.com/o2jL.gif

[solid schooner]

This might be a good start with the references but it might exist as a thing

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durable_water_repellent

[rugged skiff]

Well she shouldn’t be setting cloths on fire when she wears them. She’s going to have to wear cloths.

[opal bane]

Well she probably won't be breaking any laws without any it'd just be weird

[solid schooner]

Aye but I was thinking that if she's in water and it sets off the electrics or fire, then that too is going off in flames as well xDD

[opal bane]

The laws of man dont apply!

[night tartan]

Yeah... and neuro is probably the first one that wants to buy docens of outfits for herself

[rugged skiff]

Yeah she’ll definitely want to buy clothes lmao

[solid schooner]

The laws of men don't apply.
But the will of neuro is such she'd be getting clothing whether we like it or not and she'd own that clothing xD

[opal bane]

How are we going to do hair? Just a wig she can have?

Velcro scalp

[solid schooner]

She'd complain ;-;

[night tartan]

We probably need something that's easily replacable. Unfortunately, we probably cannot create hair that grows so, every time she wants a new haircut that requires more hair than she has... (she'd need a new wig)

[rugged skiff]

A wig that won’t come off easily.

[solid schooner]

Do remember, hair is heat absorbing, which is anti to cooling

[opal bane]

Well the head wont have all that much going on in it right

[rugged skiff]

Hair and a hood?

[opal bane]

Plus we can probably make some synthetic hair that works as a heat sink or something

[solid schooner]

No need to project

[opal bane]

Ow my single braincell

[solid schooner]

She'd want hats for sure

[rugged skiff]

Yeah like a frog hat lol

[solid schooner]

The thing with wigs is that the hair will get everywhere, so how are you gonna make it so hair doesn't get into body, is probably how one will make it waterproof

[night tartan]

hair loss

[solid schooner]

I was thinking metal hair..

[opaque quartz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg96lDw7sNw

[opal bane]

Horror movie sound effects while brushing

[solid schooner]

Like, braids of tendrils of slightly thick metal hair

I'm not sure why I had that thought

[opaque quartz]

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

[solid schooner]

Ears

[rugged skiff]

They use wigs on humanoid robots already

[rugged skiff]

What??

[solid schooner]

It's not that it's not possible, it's just hair loss and hair entanglement inside the machine is my concern

[opal bane]

They never had to deal with a neuro

[rugged skiff]

Huh?

[solid schooner]

Wigs, not a misspell

[opal bane]

Gotta make one for vedal that will turn neuro's complaining into energy

[rugged skiff]

Wdym by flying??

LMFAO

[solid schooner]

[solid schooner]

Honestly, not a bad thing to do is to capture some of her energy when speaking back into something else

[opal bane]

Don't think it's worth it, sound doesn't take that much energy (or does it?)

Plus might muddle her speech

[solid schooner]

Humans voice get muddled by the mouth, what you hear isn't what's heard by others

[solid schooner]

Depends on how much space is used I guess

Idkkk I can't describe things atm

[opal bane]

Space, development time, cost, hooking it into the network

[opaque quartz]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZBFKjme46wk

[solid schooner]

Maybe something like

Her ear microphones would be feeding into a data thing which turns it into information neuro could use, perhaps an acoustic engine could help them run a little less costly when theirs constantly noise around?

[opaque quartz]

how so?

[ruby lagoon]

I'm pretty sure the acoustic engines need a lot of noise to really work

Speaker placed on one side to work as a refridgerator levels of noise

[opaque quartz]

this version functions via heat

the heat creates resonance that is converted into motion

[opal bane]

Could also filter out backround noises from louder noises nearby to help her not get overwhelmed in noisy environments

[opaque quartz]

it's more efficient becuase there's no moving parts, and therefore no friction

well

less moving parts

[ruby lagoon]

Well, there's material stress, but it can be pretty good. Just not 'turn noise in a crowd into useful energy' levels of good

[opaque quartz]

the chinese submarine puts their alternator directly on the end of it so that there's no piston or wheel

instead they just have a copper rod moving back and forth through a magnetic field

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, yep, that's the 'internal stroke stirling generator' variant. I think it's quieter and more efficient

[opaque quartz]

yeah really compact too

[ruby lagoon]

It requires making a linear motor though instead of a normal motor

[opaque quartz]

we should go with that imo

[night tartan]

okey, so... we gotta make one of those engines?

[opaque quartz]

seems like our best option rn

no moving parts whatsoever, just air

so it's very efficient

question is if we can make or find a linear alternator

i searched them up and none are easily available

[ruby lagoon]

I mean, when we want an engine. I don't think having engines at all are MVP though.

[opaque quartz]

depends what we want imo

[ruby lagoon]

They are pretty cool and have a lot of benefits, but it's more than necessary for getting a robot moving. So whether we do it dep-- yep, it's if we want to

[opaque quartz]

24/7 running neuro would need an engine

short stream neuro wouldn't need one technically

[opal bane]

What's MVP in this context?

[opaque quartz]

i think neuro who does irl collabs would need an engine of some kind

it depends on what we want from her

[ruby lagoon]

minimum viable product (robot)

[night tartan]

Probably. I mean.. neuro has to travel to america to collab with toma

[opaque quartz]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanically_powered_flashlight#Shake_type_design

wikepedia pointed me here

these use linear alternators (sometimes)

[night tartan]

oh, wait. CRAP! I used to have a radio that had a crank like that!

Wait, there's another type of crank...

[opal bane]

I have one kf those

[night tartan]

Those ones. Oh. Nostalgic!

[opaque quartz]

loved these as a kid

[night tartan]

OH god! I used to have one of those. I swear, they never worked for me

[opaque quartz]

lol

i wonder how efficient the generator is?

if we can find where they source their alternators, we can make a miniature generator that's very space efficient

[night tartan]

They probably make them in house i don't know

[night tartan]

That explains things

[opaque quartz]

https://www.ehow.com/way_5371860_diy-shake-flashlight.html

[night tartan]

I don't think those generators are super efficient.

[opaque quartz]

you might be right

we'll have to look into what makes an efficient alternator design

i don't think they sell liniar alternators commercially

[ruby lagoon]

Huh... I suppose we could just use multiple coils of magnet wire, or use a wire winder, then it would be a lot more efficient

[night tartan]

The other option is to do this, but now i remember the target was to do "no moving parts" so it kinda defeats the purpose

[opaque quartz]

yeah that'd be the piston design

[opaque quartz]

very true. i guess a lot of it comes down to how well we weave the wires

i'll look up some youtube tutorials on it

[ruby lagoon]

I feel like it'd be similar to making tesla coils actually, at least part of it

With tesla coils, you have to wind one side of a giant air transformer coil. In this case you'd need to wind a tube or a bunch of tube's instead

[opaque quartz]

true

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozrXfwKstJ8

tightly packed wires seems like the way to go

i don't know how to make electronics safely

[ruby lagoon]

Avoid inductive kicks and charged capacitors

You might want a flyback diode somewhere around the linear generator so that if something disconnects on the circuits attached to the generator somehow it doesn't cause a huge spark

[opaque quartz]

do you think a very long neodymium magnet and really long and thick coil would be more effective? Or is it better to have lots of coil, but small magnet?

[ruby lagoon]

I honestly don't know

[opaque quartz]

seems like it sort of

we can probably surround the air piston with the mechanism about half way along

that might interfere with the generation though

i think fitting it on the end is best

lets say roughly 5cm long alternator for now, and a large and wide piston so that it has thick walls for handling the heat and pressure

so roughly about 5cm by 10cm

[ruby lagoon]

Sounds like enough space

[opaque quartz]

Do you think fighting gravity by placing it upright would reduce the efficiency?

[ruby lagoon]

Hmm, I don't think so, usually there'd be some sort of spring to keep the piston in place anyway, and gravity would slightly displace the rest position

It might decrease the efficiency if the full stroke is outside the generator length, but I think that could be minimized

[opaque quartz]

Nice, ty for the feedback/info so far. When we design this we can probably make a version that replaces engine space with battery space as well.

[ruby lagoon]

Nice

Yw

[opaque quartz]

oh i assumed it'd be the opposite

becasue i assume the coils would be on the other side of the generator housing from the magnet

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, the magnets need to be as close to the copper coils as possible

[opaque quartz]

ah yeah we'd want the magnets outside the generator then

we have the room for it at least

https://global.kyocera.com/prdct/fc/industries/mechanical/index.html

also we can probably make the generator itself out of ceramics

assuming repeated local heating doesn't cause stress

[ruby lagoon]

Er, the magnets should be attached to the moving part of the piston, insulated by some materials, and they should be surrounded by stationary copper coils at all times during movement

Ah, like this:

[opaque quartz]

yeah i was thinking it'd be a rod in the ceramic housing with hollow neodynium magnets half way down the rod surrounded by very close wire coils

[ruby lagoon]

(Also, we'd want to double check how the magnets handle temperature)

[opaque quartz]

that way the coils are as close as possible

[opaque quartz]

very true

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, ok, I think we might've been in agreement the whole time then

[opaque quartz]

This explains why on the chinese device, they went with a copper plate surrounded by magnets instead of the inverse

the rod would have to seperate the magnets from the housing ig

makes it longer but that's not too bad

[ruby lagoon]

Fair. Depending on the magnets that might be the best case even if that means the electrical contacts move

[opaque quartz]

i think i might try to make a mockup of this kind of engine myself using the DIY guide for the shake-recharging flashlights and a basic piston.

not sure where i'll get the magnet from but it's probably available

Ok here's an idea, what if it was double sided?

[ruby lagoon]

Wait... that made me think: wouldn't the magnets be on the cold side?

[opaque quartz]

wires in the middle, shaft on either side, engine housing around shaft

[opaque quartz]

yeah

[ruby lagoon]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Stirling_Animation.gif/170px-Stirling_Animation.gif

[opaque quartz]

there would be wadidng in the way which i didn't think about as well

[opaque quartz]

in this example the magnet would be the only part, so it'd be touching the heat, however, with this design there is a heat-seperator

lemme get a good pic

the part where the steel fastens to the tube is the border between cold and hot

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, I found a couple:

[opaque quartz]

yup the latter one especially

[ruby lagoon]

yea

That one uses copper coils around magnets tho

[opaque quartz]

probably for the best, since they won't ever get hot enough to become weaker

it makes the whole thing more simple

[ruby lagoon]

yea

[opaque quartz]

i think if it were double sided, it'd work even better

we can probably slim down the large central section a lot and also the pistons themselves

[ruby lagoon]

probably. They might've been increased in size for the diagram

[opaque quartz]

maybe not the start position, but it gives an idea of what it might operate like

the walls are thick in this model because we'd use ceramics and heat up the ends with lean ethanol and a fan

you can melt glass with those temperatures

the balls inside the tube are the wadding

[ruby lagoon]

Wait, why does it need two heated ends?

[opaque quartz]

pushes the bar back and forth

cool area further towards the center ensures they both operate normally

it'd need two ethanol fires though which is a big drawback

[ruby lagoon]

There's probably a reason there are no stirling engines made that way

[opaque quartz]

maybe the resonance cancels out?

that's all i can think of

[ruby lagoon]

It looks more like the cold and hot chambers are enough to create motion by themselves, and yeah I think you'd have to synchronize it perfectly for constructive interference instead of destructive interference, so it could actually randomly cancel out if that's not handled

[opaque quartz]

true

single sided version is more compact as well

[opaque quartz]

I just realized this is probably double sided

goodnight

[ruby lagoon]

Well it looks double sided at least, might not be internally

night

[ruby lagoon]

Alright, I think this is good enough for today:

[opal bane]

I like your funny words magic man

[rugged skiff]

A stirling engine is impractical. A humanoid robot requires fast and precise movements, which would be be easier to achieve with electric actuators. Stirling engines dont provide the immediate high torque needed for that. You could use it to generate electricity for batteries but it would still suffer from a slow start up and it would be inefficient for dynamic tasks. If you want to create a quadruped that moves slowly, it could work, but not for a humanoid robot.

It would also be too bulky and balance is important for a humanoid robot.

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, yeah, that's the plan: using it to generate electricity for the batteries

[ruby lagoon]

There are different sizes, some really small. It might be tough getting the right size considering everything needed for heating/cooling as well though

[rugged skiff]

It would still be inefficient, all the cooling required could add too much weight, and it would still not work well for fast dynamic movements.

[ruby lagoon]

It would work exactly the same for fast dynamic movements because it's not planned to be directly attached to the motors at all, just charging batteries.
As for inefficiencies, Stirling engines can be quite efficient for engines, especially if made of high temperature materials.
The cooling is a good point though. Getting a good heat difference would probably require cooling equipment about the size of the engine... but again the engine can be shrunk down.

The real problem though is feature creep. There's no real need for the engine if we have batteries, though for Stirling engines there is a need for batteries due to the slow startup. It does improve how long the robot can move without recharging, but I feel like it's better to get some simple 1.0 version working before making all the improvements.

Also unlike the face where MatthewBadger seemed to have some detailed plans, I feel like we're switching from engine to engine without anyone really being an expert on the engines and wanting to implement it themselves

(Though, if there is someone, then it would be pretty cool to add)

[opal bane]

We probably need a way to expel waste from the engines other than the human biological way

Or at least make sure it's non lethal

[rugged skiff]

Yeah that's how I feel honestly.

I know most people and companies stick with Lithium batteries when working with humanoid robots, and they do it for a reason.
Jumping to try something experimental without expertise would most likely end up leading to failure.

Or worse, end up causing a fire.

[last epoch]

I agree with the problem being feature creep. Right now our priority should be on the MVP (something I think we should formally define some time soon)

[queen field]

While on one hand, water cooling is neat and effective and all, but I can't help but feel weary of it. In my experience, hoses tend to not like being jostled around willynilly, and the places where water cooling is used is usually stationary ones; nuke plants, PCs, vehicles: Places where the actual tubing are kept stationary.
For this, the tubes would be almost always in dymanic motion, and if the vibrations from a car's engine is enough to loosen the clamps on the radiator's hoses, then the risk is high that repeated, strong shaking from the robot's movements would just absolutely push the clamps and hoses to their limits. Even if assuming that the hoses are kept exclusively to the torso - so no water cooling for the motors in the limbs - then that's still a lot of movement as the torso moves a lot when we move, and will be moreso for the robot.

Still, I'm open to it being at least attemped before writing it off. Don't know what works until it's tried in practice.

Also friendly reminder; feature creep is a slow and insidious project killer.

Additionally, the fact that the hoses in a PC can fail despite the most movement it'd get is from the fan and if it's an unlucky one, the user if stationed the desk, is a red flag for me, personally.
Can be summed up to manufacturer error, part failure or simply user error if they either built the PC themselves and didn't secure the clamps good enough, but the fact it can happen regardless and the aftermatch of such a failure tend to be pricy given, ya know, electronics now drowned with coolant, which is hopefully just water.

[opaque quartz]

hose would need to be secured in such a way that full range of motion of the limb does not transmit force to the connection of the hose to the mechanical components. A tall order.

[opaque quartz]

i can assemble a plan for only batteries but i absolutely plan on making an engined version at some point afterwards. Maybe v2?

the recent discoveries about limb locking mean that a lot of the reasons i avoided 100% battery power are now void

[opal bane]

I think the MVP will be just getting it to move with a humanlike gait, be able to operate for at least 2 hours at a time, and mostly pass the uncanny valley effect

That's like bare minimum for this

Oh and a speaker in the mouth

[opaque quartz]

pretty nice description for a minimum viable product

[opal bane]

Skin is a "it'd be really nice to have this"

But probably also somewhat necessary for uncanny valley

[ruby lagoon]

The MVP for my next robot is just: "neck"

Getting limbs/a neck that moves right and can lift things is actually pretty hard, so that will be the work for my next wheeled robot arm
(Though, I have a bunch of under-powered motors and I'm making gearboxes for them so I can make more robots at near zero cost)

[opal bane]

After we get all that and make sure it won't spontaneously combust then we can probably find a way to tell vedal about this

[solid schooner]

The MVP is all you guys

[fossil drum]

i was wondering

can neurobot communicate with anything other then reactions?

[fossil drum]

true

[ruby lagoon]

Right now the only thing I know of for communicating with the robot from the AI is my kinda hastily made ad hoc code. It doesn't have anything for text or wifi communication, just camera and mic/speaker, but I could add different methods of communication.
If there was a screen, maybe we could output text/images.

[fossil drum]

im talking on discord

[ruby lagoon]

Oh, lol, the discord bot NeuroBot

[fossil drum]

yes

exactly

[ruby lagoon]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[fossil drum]

so you dont know?

[ruby lagoon]

wait, there's cookies too

[fossil drum]

she also reacts to pet

[ruby lagoon]

Huh, also some translation

[fossil drum]

i wonder if she will be communicating normally on discord

although

i feel like

vedal wouldnt like that

mostly cuz he wouldnt have much controll over said conversations

might be wrong tho

[ruby lagoon]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[rugged skiff]

He mentioned potentially letting her admin the discord in a serious talk with her while on Scribblenauts. I feel like he would once she’s mature enough, more intelligent, and less likely to do what people ask because it would be funny. She’s not there yet but maybe someday. Only Vedal knows.

[fossil drum]

i see

when was that?

[rugged skiff]

There’s a clip of it, one of their deep talks during the subathon while they were playing Scribblenauts.

[fossil drum]

i see

so not that long ago

[ruby lagoon]

I feel like 'more intelligent' practically just requires more parameters, which means more RAM/VRAM.
Maybe some sparsity could improve that with really wide networks, but I haven't seen much in AI showing that it's possible to get more intelligence out of a same size transformer neural net without a lot of training, more parameters, or recurrence which limits training to sequential stuff.

[fossil drum]

well neuro's life is pretty much one big training

[ruby lagoon]

Facebook's llama should have had quite a lot more training than Neuro

[fossil drum]

how long is llama in usage

[rugged skiff]

I don’t want to speculate too much on how he will achieve it. It would very much be kept a secret once he does, but she’ll most likely get to that point eventually.

[rugged skiff]

The ability to think rationally as well.

[ruby lagoon]

Even in biology, more intelligence is pretty strongly correlated with 'more parameters' or more neurons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons
There are definitely improvements beyond that, both in AI and biology, but at a certain point, you just need more RAM
I'm not sure the requirement is necessarily intelligence though. It might be more security, where random people can't just say the wrong thing and have Neuro delete all messages or something.

[rugged skiff]

He wants her to be much more intelligent.

[ruby lagoon]

Well, maybe I could share some sparsity kernels and sparse backpropogation methods. That would probably help a lot

[rugged skiff]

He knows what he’s doing lmao

Just let him cook

[ruby lagoon]

Eh, the more the merrier

[fossil drum]

you could ask him if he wants to

[ruby lagoon]

I still need to fully integrate my stuff into pytorch though. Right now it's on a mix of OpenMP and Vulkan. Translation from vulkan kompute to cuda should be something most LLMs can do though, it's the other way that's harder.

[rugged skiff]

Yeah just don’t ping him lol

[fossil drum]

well thats obvious

thats like

going nuclear

on yourslef

[ruby lagoon]

lol, yea

[fossil drum]

anyways good talk guys. im gonna go stream now

ill be back in few hours

[rugged skiff]

Alright. I’m going to get more hours of sleep in.

[ruby lagoon]

Y'know, I think 'sleep' is one of the things AI/Neuro could use to really improve memory/intelligence.
In REM sleep, people play back memories but also see how things could have been if they acted differently.
Maybe if the top error states were recorded and played back, that could work as AI 'REM sleep'.

It might be possible to store some sparse activation states in cpu ram/hard drive during the day, rank them by highest error, and play those back when offline.
Edit: and inhibit the activated attention states so other parts can be trained.

I think there's a huge 'should've thought of that' problem with cross product attention you don't have with normal neural networks that the 'REM sleep' would solve

[opaque quartz]

i agree

[ruby lagoon]

Ah, found the vid explaining why I think this: https://youtu.be/SRfJQews1AU?t=639

Backprop becomes zero sometimes in the attention mechanism except for the activated portions, so minimal learning happens. There are a lot of ways to deal with it, but they kind of feel like hacks to me, like adding randomness or smoothing things.

[ruby lagoon]

Wow, I did not expect TPU to be way better for gears due to its flexibility.
Apparently it can avoid pitting/wear really well because it bends/squishes, so it lasts a lot longer, while the ultimate tensile strength and yield strength are still both quite high

ABS got a red ~50% safety factor for pitting, while TPU didn't

Then again, raw aluminum and aluminum alloys... my calculator might be a bit off (though 1mm module is really small)

Honestly, maybe just coat the gears a little if we really need high torque & small size. Though that could increase friction... unless it's something like PTFE.

[ruby lagoon]

ABS coated in TPU or pure TPU may be able to perform 50% better than pure aluminum gears. For pure TPU though, helix angles or extra contacts may be necessary so teeth don't flex. TPU can be relatively low friction though.
Helix gears have an axial force though, which needs to be countered if it's not a double helix. Double helixes require print-in-place for planetary gearboxes.

[opaque quartz]

my irrational dislike of tpu defeated once again

[ruby lagoon]

heh

[opaque quartz]

practise practise practise

[ruby lagoon]

I see you're practicing to get a head

[opaque quartz]

haha

[ruby lagoon]

Another robot idea (screen face edition), from Stray:

Also: my avatar

[opaque quartz]

i did some research for v2, and a stirling engine is the wrong way to go unless we use an autoclave to increase pressure in the system, as we're losing as high as 99% of the available power otherwise.

(i did this research because it interested me)

gonna work on more blender practise later today

[opal bane]

Question i thought of while trying to sleep: do the human strength calculations include adrenaline doing what it does or just average human strength

[ruby lagoon]

Huh. I was thinking a burn chamber to increase temperature due to engine efficiency. Stirling engines sometimes have special gas inside though. Where did you find we need to increase pressure?

[opaque quartz]

As the pressure in the chamber increases, the force exerted on the gas by the same amount of heat also increases. This pushes the piston with more force which results in greater power outputs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqIapDKtvzc&t=23s

[ruby lagoon]

Oh! The efficiency remains the same actually. I think the power output rises because it has to heat up more air

[opaque quartz]

without high pressures, stirling engines woefully underproduce compared to conventional engines for their size, although have higher efficiency

[opaque quartz]

yeah

the power we get out of the system increases, but the efficinecy of the fuel burn is about the same i beleive

we can't pull more energy out of the fuel than actually exists

[ruby lagoon]

30-60 atm is tire pressure though. Seems fairly doable for a sealed chamber, though long term you'd want something to maintain internal engine pressure

[opaque quartz]

a safe pressure would be ideal so that it doesn't become too dangerous. This is why i think an autoclave housing a Stirling or thermoacoustic heat engine would be ideal

[opaque quartz]

yup

lemme grab some pics

[ruby lagoon]

Wait, no, tire pressure is 30-60 psi. It's 2-4 atm.

Still doable, but now it's harder

[opaque quartz]

autoclaves like these are designed to be heated at high pressures; it's rated for about 400 degrees celsius with a working pressure up to or below 45MPa (444 atmospheres)

the hollow tube within would be ideal to inclose the wire spool, magnet, and piston

a contained design is ideal for higher pressures because it doesn't rely on rubber diaphrams. however for lower pressures, rubber diaphrams can work as well

higher pressure designs would require that the wire exit the autoclave via a high pressure valve or seal

my findings show that unless we went with a pressurized system, the stirling isn't a good option despite its low maintenance and use of ethanol, so therefore if we want to use one, we'd house it in a pressure vessel like this for maximum safety, even if our preference was to go for a lower pressure design

i personally think that a presurized stirling engine would be a good option

but only if we can use it safely

it's also quite costly at around £1200 for an autoclave of sufficent size

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/0-5L-mini-pressure-vessel-reactor_1600209481010.html

500ml is about this volume on the inside

enough room for the alternator + piston

Also, going with a pressurized gas would allow us to use a much more effective gas type

[ruby lagoon]

Yep. Iirc Helium transfers heat much better

[opaque quartz]

yup

[ruby lagoon]

Seems like designing one would require finding the optimal tradeoff between total volume vs pressure

[opaque quartz]

There is also an improvement that i came up with, which is to attach rods to the rear of the piston head that loop around the piston chamber and intersect the cold-side entrance of the regenerator. Attached to the rods are choke valves sized to the inner diameter of the pipe. At the beginning of the forward stroke, when the gas is cooled, the choke valve is forced into position within the pipe, fully closing at the end of the stroke and heavily reducing the pipe diameter.

As the pressure of the heated chamber builds, the gas is forced into the regenerator and pushes the piston simultaneously, forcing its way through the narrow hole of the choke valve at the same time, which cools the gas. As the piston is forced back, the choke valve is opened, increasing the diameter of the regenerator again.

This difference in width on the forward and return strokes ensures that the gas is cooled on the forward stroke, but not cooled on the return stroke.

[opaque quartz]

yes that's true

[ruby lagoon]

Needs physics/mechanical equations to verify... I'm not up to that rn

[opaque quartz]

i'll build one and see if it makes a differrence in efficiency

my biggest concern is whether the gas needs to be condensed in some way artificially on the return stroke in order for this to work properly

might take me a while to get the materials together but it'd be a fun experiment

[ruby lagoon]

Yeah, I imagine actually building some of these could be hard, especially the optimized ones

[opaque quartz]

will probably need to buy a torch for silver welds, some steel tubing of various diameters, some steel rods, a closed tube, steel sheet, and a bandsaw

oh and some porous heat-capturing material for the regenerator

maybe a thin drill bit as well and a drill

oh and something to check rpm with

if the choke valve design works out, it should produce higher RPM than the regular design for the same amount of heat

for that reason maybe a thermal gauge

[ruby lagoon]

might get more output then, though also might lower efficiency

[opaque quartz]

huh true, i guess efficiency can only be measured using a linear alternator

[ruby lagoon]

Yep, power out / power in

[opaque quartz]

yup

i guess that's an excuse to start learning how to build those

that way if the test bares fruit, i can make a proper design after

[ruby lagoon]

neat!

[ruby lagoon]

(Idea: I wonder if it's be possible to attach one of those 3D stable diffusion models to neuro, like have her LLM act as the transformer in the diffusion model before going back to being an LLM, and then she could slowly generate video game worlds as if she were in a lucid dream... might need some vision and other additions though)

[rugged skiff]

That would probably increase latency.

[night tartan]

Latency mentioned

[ruby lagoon]

Definitely. I plan on making a stable-diffusion based AI for myself rather than an LLM one though (so, speaking is generating Fourier transforms for example, moving is generating poses, etc.), and that's going to need a lot of improvements to get to something reasonable like 30fps.
It'd only need one step per fps rather than 20 though, since it'd be working off the previous frame instead of noise, but I think that still needs a 10x-20x speedup or so...
...maybe I could get away with 10-20 more GPUs for it...

[spare vector]

Maybe find a bimetallic thermometer to hookup to a thermal exhaust opening that's closed when not in use?

[spare vector]

You can use a soldering iron for some types of silver welding. Depending on if it has any iron content in the alloy of filler metal. Your cheapest option for welding would be an oxygen acetylene torch. For a better joint you would want to use Tungsten Inert Gas welding with a filler rod.

[spare vector]

A warning when it comes to sheet metal. That's a whole other can of worms compared to just welding and cutting other thicker steels. You need some specialized equipment to do certain bending and cutting operations. Those operations can also require some extra math to account for springback and stretching of the metal. A good resource for that would be the Machinery's Handbook.

[opaque quartz]

ty. I'll have a look at it and incorporate those methods when i make the low pressure choke valve prototype

[ruby lagoon]

This thread, but engines:

[opaque quartz]

it really do be like that

[fossil drum]

yamaha be like:

[night tartan]

Combustion engines.
RC plane engines.
Petrol engines.
Glow fuel engines.
Ethanol engines.
Stirling engines.
Crank lantern generators.
Shake lantetn generators.
Stirling acoustic engines.
Preasurized Stirling engines.

I wonder what would be the next idea

[fossil drum]

blood run engine?

wait is human body an engine run indirectly by blood?

[solid schooner]

No, not really, oxygen is transferred around using blood, but not the ATP that's required for energy

[night tartan]

I would see it more like an engine cooled by blood

[solid schooner]

Which is the last step needed in the ignition

[opal bane]

the blood is the part that runs

[fossil drum]

okay then

still tho

an engine that runs on blood sounds metal as fuck

[opal bane]

accidentally reinventing ultrakill

[fossil drum]

i actually forgot about ultrakill when thinking about this

so accidentally is correct here

[solid schooner]

Like oxygen's place in the ATP cycle is very important, it's basically the without this it doesn't work, but that's the same for the rest of it.

at the very end of the ATP cycle one oxygen is added which is given by blood, but the start is microcondira

Microcondira is not named the powerhouse of the cell without a reason xD

[fossil drum]

but like

do u guys think making an engine that runs on blood is even possible?

in theory atleast?

[ruby lagoon]

I mean, blood is edible, so probably, but it's also probably not a good idea, for obvious reasons

[night tartan]

The problem is... blood is.. organic. Where do we get blood? Normally, we produce blood

[ruby lagoon]

Vampire Neuro

[fossil drum]

well

blood banks?

wait

blood banks are a thing right?

[fossil drum]

why blood being edible is an requirement? i dont think gas is edible

[ruby lagoon]

It means we can turn it into energy, so it's possible to turn it into energy

[night tartan]

Any chance of turning oxigen into usable fuel?

(I don't even know what I said)

[ruby lagoon]

Nah. Oxygen isn't flammable

[night tartan]

Yikes

[ruby lagoon]

oxygen makes other things flammable instead

[fossil drum]

i see

[ruby lagoon]

This does give me some engine-related ideas though. In pure oxygen, fuels burn much more easily even if there's water around them. Moisture content around 50-70% is hard to combust in pure oxygen, while 20-30% is hard to combust in our atmosphere, so a pure oxygen chamber would have a much easier time burning fuels... that would be a pretty advanced addition to any engine though.

[opal bane]

we just need to figure out how to burn water

it's made of hydrogen and oxygen, two fairly burny things

[fossil drum]

ah this gave me an nostalgic memory

wait lemme bring up what i mean

[opal bane]

sure the anti fire liquid can be set on fire

i know exactly what you mean

[ruby lagoon]

That's hydrogen fuel from water electrolysis. You need a graphene lined tank to store the hydrogen, and then it can act as a pretty good battery

[fossil drum]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ls-38qREh4

such an classic

[opal bane]

we just need to shove a electrolysis whatsit into the robot and a hydrogen generator

[ruby lagoon]

I think the graphene part's beyond current material's science or manufacturing, so we'll just have to advance those fields

[opal bane]

exactlyy

least dedicated fanbase right here

[opaque quartz]

not only would it be advanced, it'd also be incredibly dangerous

a cool idea though

[ruby lagoon]

True. Pure oxygen is pretty dangerous, especially if heated

(Side note, I might take a break from gears a bit to look at this stuff...)
https://unsloth.ai/blog/deepseekr1-dynamic
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1iczucy/running_deepseek_r1_iq2xxs_200gb_from_ssd/
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1idseqb/deepseek_r1_671b_over_2_toksec_without_gpu_on/
(If that's all correct and my sparse stuff works with it, I might be able to train models a bit smaller than that size in real time with 10-20 or more cheap RAID hard drives, since SSDs break if you re-write too much.)

[opaque quartz]

sounds awesome

not too caught up on the deepseek news but i heard it was good

might make a good tool for navigation and proprioception

[ruby lagoon]

Navigation maybe. Procioception is more fast response. Running very large models off of hard drives is more useful for slow and complicated processes, while GPUs will be much useful for simpler processes that require fast reactions.

[opaque quartz]

true

[fossil drum]

Pure oxygen is a poison

[opaque quartz]

my bad i was thinking of liquid oxygen

[spare vector]

Depends on the environment I guess. Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy can definitely be bad for you. I've also known people who huffed oxygen gas from a tank in a welding shop (as a joke) and were perfectly fine afterwards.

[spare vector]

@ruby lagoon
How many planet gears will your gearbox have?

[ruby lagoon]

It seems like 3 or 4 works pretty well for finding most gear ratios

...honestly, maybe I should allow a range of planets to the gearbox UI

[spare vector]

No sweat I'm just trying to understand your calculator. Did you build from scratch using formulas or is it a series of modules in freecad auto-finding the forces and stuff?

[ruby lagoon]

I built it from scratch using formulas
It requires the freecad.gears plugin to generate the 3d gears, but right now I'm getting the UI and calculations right separate from freecad.

Freecad doesn't really have anything to quickly find the forces. I might be able to use the Finite Element Analysis plugin after making 3d gears, but it would be really, really slow

[spare vector]

RIP. If you want any help with Force Analysis I could try.

Although FEA is WAY beyond me.

[ruby lagoon]

Fair. You can look at the code if you want

[spare vector]

Nah.

I can't program for shit.

[ruby lagoon]

Huh... I wonder if some of the gear stuff would've been in those classes

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=fe1a219b86058a5cf569d4222cff595df1794eed

[spare vector]

Did you write that, if so that's awesome.

[ruby lagoon]

Hah, no. I'm not that into gear stuff

Would be awesome though

It was an example of the different papers I was looking at for the code

[spare vector]

Ah

[opaque quartz]

i got sidetracked by plasma toroid fusors and acoustic levitation 😭

[opal bane]

We're just doing technobable now ok

[opaque quartz]

[ruby lagoon]

Wait no one here DM'd Ellie did they? (jk): https://youtu.be/LGMNlM4yL7A?si=dxGA04MCgvij2y4f

[opal bane]

I have a hard time pinging moderators for important stuff I don't think i would survive pinging someone with more than 100 viewers

@floral quarry you have been drafted into the neurobot development team

Resistance is futile

[ruby lagoon]

Wait, based anti big tech dev?

[opal bane]

Even if he's not actually a dev it's still funny to draft people for the cause

[ruby lagoon]

fair

[opal bane]

Anyway back to imaging a neruo live concert

[spare vector]

Yes gear design is covered to some extent.

[floral quarry]

what are we making

remember that response will be limited as I have exams

and all blueprints shall be done on a drafting table so do not expect cad models

I have a potato laptop which I compensate with my drawing and a slide rule

[rugged skiff]

An android.

[floral quarry]

sign me up

I'm bored anyways

Ok as far as I have read we are struggling with power

And to that end y'all have come up with an engine

If you folks are serious about following through with this, then I suggest someone start a google doc or a shared document of a sort

I was working on stuff with artificial muscle fibres with one purpose: to speed up movement

That was until I reached end of school year and abandoned it due to the million exams for college entrance

There are two ways we can go: either choose muscle fibres or go fully mechanical

https://youtu.be/fBNX-OXdolM?si=Yna2vXE1rdkR843v

Something for a small battery setup

As for engines... you folks are certainly going the right way... but some things I have read make me feel thermodynamics would not play nice

I would have immediately suggested a fission reactor was it not for the fact it is illegal to even touch anything nuclear in my country

Not even the ores

Be warned: if you want serious power, you will eventually need a powerful engine

[fossil drum]

We already have a doc tho

[fossil drum]

What country are you from

[opaque quartz]

engine cannot be stopped

it's engines all the way down

[ruby lagoon]

We're not necessarily making an engine first. People are just obsessed. 18650s and 21700s are good enough to get things running and I have a UPS circuit for them. (Engines are better for power / long term running, but harder)
As for muscle fibers, I made a gearbox designer ui for planetaries, and I'm doing split rings after, so we can have powerful pulleys from motors ( or Series Elastic Actuators)
Google docs are pinned

[opaque quartz]

@floral quarry ty for the feedback

[ruby lagoon]

Wait, I think we still don't really have a design doc. We have a research doc and a history of work doc, but nothing like an organized agreement between all our plans and priorities. It's not clear what the first robot version should actually be and what tech it should have, or the second

[opaque quartz]

yes that's true

we've been making it up as we go along

i think we should make a document that defines what exactly our end product should look like

and then breaks that up into steps or avenues to achieve that

[ruby lagoon]

(Ah, idk what it's called otherwise, but I think 'video game design document' is kinda what we're missing, but robot design)

[opaque quartz]

part of it is that we don't know what we will come up with that can be added, yet. We know that she needs to have arms, legs, head, torso, but not in what form that should take

we've settled on some things, but those things were come up with on the fly you know?

it's very 'in flux' at the moment

what do you think?

[ruby lagoon]

I mean, that's fine. The design doc can be modified as we go. It doesn't have to be set in stone

[opaque quartz]

very true

i'll set one up real quick

[ruby lagoon]

Mind if I add in some 'before humanoid' or 'before face' robots? I feel like we should have a few versions, like neurobot with and without an engine.

[opaque quartz]

I feel like such prototypes would come before v1 and probably whilst ellie is working on her robot, if she chooses to.

We can give them a designation in the design doc

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_gY5UZQh4Kz2YYL1XvHLDYsqq42asHxa3bZvdFq3N7U/edit?usp=sharing

i'll give you access once you're in

[opal bane]

Need to summon a mod to pin

[opal bane]

Thanks

[prime rose]

no problem

[ruby lagoon]

On mobile rn so I won't be able to do much for a few hours, but sent the request

Wow, fast mod

[night tartan]

new document this is getting serious

[opal bane]

Watching in the shadows

[opal bane]

More docs than arg crew

[night tartan]

We're gonna need them. We gotta put eventually schematics of neuro bot several times.

[opal bane]

Iirc the main things we need to figure out for v1 is how the face works and how the legs will work

[opaque quartz]

@ruby lagoon personally i'm thinking that any prototype versions we make should consist of parts connected to placeholder components; An arm connected to a desk, a torso connected to nothing, a head mounted to a fake robot or dummy, etc.

This way we don't have to spend time designing parts we will scrap in version 1, and can assemble the parts togther later.

So for example if we have completed legs and torso and arms, but need a placeholder head, it'd just be a camera mounted to a steel beam with gaps missing where head/neck motors would ideally be placed.

I'd make 3d models of these individual components as well as the v1 version. This way we are most efficient with our time and also, do not get a skewed perspective that an improperly designed part would create.

[opal bane]

Engine as mentioned before is kinda optional

[opaque quartz]

arms too probably. I'm thinking of v1 as minimum neuro that fulfills design document's requirements

v2 can exceed them or refine those things

[opal bane]

I thought we had arms down pretty good

[opaque quartz]

for example i'm fairly confident we can cram enough batteries into her to give her 2 hours life if she's conservative with movements. So v1 would be entirely battery-powered

[opaque quartz]

oh you mean we gotta finish working on the things you listed?

that, i agree with

[opal bane]

Ye

[opaque quartz]

rn face is very up in the air. I'm thinking we stick with small brushless motors due to their precision and dexterity, which is needed for the face

a lot of humanity comes from slow, delicate movement

[opal bane]

Face is definitely the hardest part

[ruby lagoon]

Fair. I was planning another wheeled robot arm for myself. That's a bit better than an arm connected to a desk. Maybe after that we could add a torso to get something like R.O.B., then humanoid with screen head like in Stray if the face isn't done after that.

[opal bane]

Something i don't think we've talked about yet but how long is it going to take to charge all that with a standard cable

[opaque quartz]

yeah that'd go hard

also it'd be hilarious

[opal bane]

What if just a standalone leg

A single leg

[ruby lagoon]

F

Neuroleg

Wait... "The Wrong Trousers"

[opal bane]

https://images.app.goo.gl/XkPmeVAHqMATdq61A

[opaque quartz]

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

[opaque quartz]

love that movie

[opaque quartz]

Lads i just realized we were missing the obvious:
https://www.diy.com/departments/invena-50cm-1-2-x-1-2-flexi-flexible-kitchen-basin-monobloc-tap-connector-hose-pipe/5907798716210_BQ.prd?&&&&msclkid=1bd504fd3d461943abdb6363755fefa9&gclid=1bd504fd3d461943abdb6363755fefa9&gclsrc=3p.ds

[opal bane]

Those leak real bad at the ends

[opaque quartz]

oh damn

i thought they were sealed tighter than that

[floral quarry]

india

[opaque quartz]

i'll check some vids of them in operation

[floral quarry]

born to fuck around, forced to find out

[opal bane]

Though mine may not be the same thing

Looks similar though