I was in Greece. The robot was not.
That's the update. That's basically the whole post. Go outside.
Still here? Okay. Week 3 was a vacation. I flew to Greece, put my phone on airplane mode, and committed to doing nothing. No Jetson, no Quest, no "quick check" of the bench at 1am that quietly eats four hours. The chess robot stayed exactly where I left it: slightly broken and completely unbothered.
what I shipped this week
- a truly heroic amount of tzatziki
- zero (0) commits to the repo
- one sunburn, later patched with aloe
- several sunsets, no compile step required
what I did not ship
- teleop that doesn't shake
- a single recorded pick/place episode
- any perception fixes whatsoever
- emails (allegedly)
the sprint retro
The less funny version: twelve weeks is a long stretch, and grinding through all of it with no break is how you quit somewhere around week eight. I'd spent most of the summer fighting jittery arms and phantom pieces on empty squares. A week of not thinking about any of it did more for the project than another week of debugging would have.
I came back to the same gripper that doesn't fit, the same shaky teleop, and the same board pipeline that lies about empty squares. The difference is I actually wanted to go fix them again.
Normal programming resumes in week 4, where I stop seeing in vibes and start seeing in millimeters.