Dingo, an open source robot dog | Hacker News Reader

Dingo, an open source robot dog

github.com

88 pointsstingrae46 comments

For anyone else who was curious and did not want to download an Excel file to read the table, parts will set you back $1300. Plus, who knows how much printing time.

Quite affordable as a pet: it is less than a real dog from a dog breeder :-).

Or you could adopt for a nominal fee and help a dog in need.

A real dog is way more responsibility - you gotta walk it, feed it, keep it clean and healthy. It's quite expensive even if you adopt and it is no small task. A robo dog at worse is a few hundred in parts - no worse than a single vet visit and charging the battery.

Yeah I meant adopting instead of buying a dog from a breeder as the comment I replied to was suggesting.

Suggesting random people to adopt a pet, is in my opinion wrong, unless you know the person well. Pets are not a thing, they need care, responsibility, time, additional budget and other factors you could include if you are gonna have a baby.

Yeah I meant adopting instead of buying a dog from a breeder as the comment I replied to was suggesting.

I replayed in another comment, seems like it is way better to buy minipupper that is also servos based, it does not make sense spending so much on servos based robot, arguably, it is better to spend 1300+ building bot with actual motors Lorcan[1] alike (there others with 6 motors, if recall correctly).

https://github.com/222464/Lorcan-Mini

The BoM has a lot of overpriced versions of common parts, as well.

It's not quite as bad as it seems at first blush.

There is also minipupper2[1] (I have minipupper1, waiting for version2), v2 has servos feedback (I think this first of kind in cheapest robots space), furthermore all minipupper1 hardware is also open-sourced on github[2], it is expected to be same for v2 version.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/336477435/mini-pupper-2...

[2]https://github.com/mangdangroboticsclub

Can you share how much it cost to build out minipupper1?

everything included in package, I paid (including taxes, shipping):

$529 - Pupper with Ri

$129 - Lidar

$148 - 3D Camera

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

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36299315, but no comments there)

A Dingo is a shy (with humans), wild dog in Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo. I saw once once, but it was about maybe 100-200 metres away.

Internationally, probably best known (unfortunately) for eating a baby.

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

Warning: this page loads a 7.86 MB picture of the robot.

If you're short of bandwidth or limited by a quota, uBlock Origin can be toggled easily between allowing or blocking all images. It's what I use to make my 750MiB per month GSM/4G connection last.

Curious if it replace it with an empty block that takes up the same space so the layout doesn't change?

There is an option to block media elements larger than a set size[1]. When a media element is blocked through this setting, the element is replaced with a click-to-load widget, so the layout shouldn't change with this option.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

Yeah that’s not going to work on most mobile devices.

Why not?

Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin does indeed work. And, if I'm not mistaken, aren't most devices Androids?

Edit to Add: TBF, most users may not have the technical know-how to use it in this way.

This year the market share of the Apple iPhone line exceeded 50% in the UK, and in the USA last year. So, sadly, parent is kind of right :(

What part of the internet do you use nowadays if 8 MB scares you?

Imagine living alone in Russia and having few Dingos to carry meat and fish from hunting and fishing trips, and wood, etc.

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Without reading the actual code, the structure of the system looks very clear, pleasant to understand. It's not a mess.

Why four legs?

Once the expense of four has been invested is there a better number, say six or eight, to have?

I can imagine all sorts of advantages and disadvantages. They choose four, is that because four is best? Or because a dog has four?

I am also curious about educated answers to this question, but I imagine taking a cue from millions of years of evolutionary pressure is a pretty solid bet.

Evolutionary technical debt is a thing. Many local optimum were locked into the gene pool due to random chance.

8 legs are also well representated and going strong for millions of years, not to mention carcinisation being a meme at this point.

When it comes to robotics, my best guess would be cost and complexity. We also either need a better control interface or better self driving software to take advantage of the legs moving independently (I assume optimizing how the 8 legs should move to climb a rocky path for instance is just a computational nightmare to do realtime)

Legs are expensive. You need at at least three high performance actuators plus position sensing etc. Each leg also adds weight and power drain.

Two is way hard. Six or more is also hard if you want to do it properly over rough terrain. Four is a sweet spot for human-scale robots.

Is a robo-dog able to navigate terrain and obstacles better than a machine with tracks?

If the feet get any bit of adherence (I dunno about those plastic feet), they can through much more diverse terrain, it's not even close.

But actual navigation is software related.

Wish they had SimpleFOC based control instead of servo motors

Nice! Does it support adding a camera (usb/ip)?

It has external USB and ethernet ports, and showed some additional power ports available inside.

Is all the vscode stuff required?

Of course it isn't, but limiting installation instructions to the creation of a single well-defined Docker container makes a whole lot of sense in terms of avoiding reproducibility headaches.

And by extension, with regard to make development inside a container a pleasant experience, VS Code is currently the only game in town. And I say that as someone who spent two decades getting comfortable with vim.

What's the benefit of developing inside the container instead of just linking the filesystem?

I have no idea what you mean by "just linking the filesystem".

Not having to screw with your system's dependecies and spend time making sure everything is aligned with the expected environment.

Ansible like tools could help you make the setup repeatable, but being containerized also avoids all the processor architecture and system libraries gotchas.

I don't want to install anything on my system, want to keep clean and as minimal as possible, containers full fill my OCD in this regard, I run most app's now in containers too, it is best linux setup I ever had in my life :)

ROS is verrrrrrry opinionated and a pain to set up in an orthogonal way to other ROS installs. It's also tied very heavily to ubuntu/debian. Putting it all into containers makes many things so much easier (it makes a few things harder, or at least it did on ros1, hopefully that's been ironed out in ros2)

The dingo ate your baby!

Reference to the 1980 case where the mother wrongly went to prison on top of losing her child, mostly because her claim was too memeable.

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

It's also a reference to a Seinfeld episode: https://youtu.be/sYTIGXvc88Y?t=7

And to the band in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Both of which reference the original case, which became a meme because the woman’s claim was seen as so unbelievable.

And then nearly a decade later it was found that she was telling the truth.

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