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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

> the "Nano Dog" is probably a cheaper and more approachable option for the garage engineer.

Hard to find out much about that or OpenDog in general. I've found videos and 3d printer files but nothing that I can read to understand what it can do and why I might want to build it.

Or do I really have to watch a bunch of YouTube videos? I hate video.

Have I missed the actual project page somehow?

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https://github.com/XRobots/miniDogV2

The code's a bit of a mess -- James is clearly not a software engineer first. This is totally understandable, given that he does so many other things!

When I first saw the code, I thought about doing a refactoring pass and making a pull request. It would be painful to test correctness without the hardware, and I don't want to make things worse, so I haven't.

Oh wow, you're not joking. I'm getting flashbacks to when I supported a team of EEs.

Hell, I'm getting flashbacks to my own code in EE lab. Except this stuff looks way less messy, not nearly enough random assembly declarations to bludgeon a register or pin into submission.

For future reference, I saw "OpenDog" and thought we were discussing James Bruton's (XRobots) OpenDog/Mini-Dog, which is where the firmware I linked above comes from.

NanoDog is something different, apparently! Sorry for any confusion I might've caused there.

It's probably also worth mentioning the project is a work in progress, and from the videos, it looks like OpenDog is likely to undergo at least one more major change before "completion".

brb building automatic testing environment with dog physics simulation

As someone who also isn't a SWE first, what are the changes you'd make and where can one learn to code in a more SWE way?

Good point, now that I am searching for it I cannot seem to find the code. At the same time it still does not require custom manufactured parts or circuit boards which makes the barrier to entry (and importantly price) a bit lower unless the Stanford folks setup a store.

I make an internet promise here and now that if I ever build the robot I'll open source the source code to control it.

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