<commit_before>## Nostalgia: Old Robot idea

- I found these while uploading a video for a proposal today. Part of why I chose to go into research was because I would
  hang out every month with a bunch of NASA scientists; we would go drinking together. They had all done PhDs, and something about their values
  and commitment to selfless research was very appealing to me. So that's where this started for me. 
- I went to a Linux event at a regular Meetup (one of the runners of the group did later on go on to work for JPL), and there
  always seemed to be a pretty large gathering of NASA scientists at this event. JPL-ers are a pretty fun bunch with a distinct sense of humour; one of them once made a virtual planetarium for us, another let us look through some telescopes at JPL, and yet another was doing work with a 3D lidar scanner connected to a cat foot can in his spare time. The whole maker/hacker scene there excited me. There was a sort of playfulness about scientific discovery that was also very creative. Cross-disciplinary training was encouraged. The first Linux Meetup I attended was by a scientist
  who worked on NASA's OnSight, which is their planetary geology VR device with a hololens. He still joked that "of course you
  of all people would like a language like Haskell". YES.
- But I made friends with a scientist/mathematician there, and we never really went back to that event; instead, we hung out
  every Thursday, and he encouraged me to go to grad school. He's still a strong mentor and advocate for me today. So I guess
  I'm this weird film-school electronics/camera technician concept design computer scientist girl now.

## I consider myself a maker

- It's weird when people tell me today that I can't do robot things because I work in programming languages research,
  because between 2008 and 2017-ish, all I did was robot-related tech stuff, hardware and soldering (I worked as an electronics and high speed camera technician for a good 8 years), and somewhere between 2014 to 2017, 
  I was also painting and drawing and learning 3D modelling. 
  I always thought that to be able to express an idea, it would
  benefit a person to learn those tools. But anyways, I spent some time learning some creative tech stuff, 
  either through exoskeleton stuff, 3D modelling,
  mentoring students, being part of hobby robotics groups such as SV-ROS, etc. In California, there is a lot of that,
  and people are intellectually curious in general, so you get a lot of people who pick up a machine shop class just
  to gain the skills for a thing they're trying to build. I miss that freedom these days. I used to be a part of a hackerspace
  in downtown LA that would do everything from large-scale 3D printing, machining, welding, woodworking, and architectural
  robotics used on parametric modelling node-based programming. Oh yeah, and sometimes there would be charcoal drawing
  in there, too, and I would attend 72 hour long drawing events, where people would stay up for 72 hours and live on nothing
  but coffee and the models would come in and pose and we would draw them and listen to music, which was often a dj live-coding! 
 
## Somehow that ended up in a Space thing
- I segued from architectural parametric modelling node-based programming into committing to learning about robots 
  fully around 2014. I attended a school in which my professors were actually working on the Mars 2020 rover. It was a pretty
  wild experience, to be honest. I also made friends with a guy who programmed robots in a dialect of Lisp, but I've lost
  touch with him. 
  
- Many years ago, I had the opportunity to do a workshop at JPL. However, to get there, we had to write a proposal
  and make several designs for possible Mars robots that might work for the 2020 mission. 
  
## At the time
- I was in love with the 3D modelling programme Rhino (which is used moreso by architects and product designers; a guy who introduced me many years ago to the technology now works for FAANG), at the time, so I used it to do quick mock-ups and designs for
  these, and thought of drones that might fit in a quadrant design with rotors and drills and that would recharge 
  on the larger rover. In retrospect, maybe it was pretty silly to expect the smaller drone to also have a drill,
  because that would use a lot of power, but it's still a fun project to go back and look at, and I did end up
  at the workshop, after all, scoring a perfect score on my project. 
  
## Here are some of the models I found.
- These are from 2016.

## This is the original wireframe CAD drawing
<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas005.png" width="500">

<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas004.png" width="500">

<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas001.png" width="500">

<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas002.png" width="500">

<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas006.png" width="500"><commit_msg>Update 2020-01-26-Sunday-January-26th.md<commit_after>## Nostalgia: Old Robot idea

- I found these while uploading a video for a proposal today. Part of why I chose to go into research was because I would
  hang out every month with a bunch of NASA scientists; we would go drinking together. They had all done PhDs, and something about their values
  and commitment to selfless research was very appealing to me. So that's where this started for me. 
- I went to a Linux event at a regular Meetup (one of the runners of the group did later on go on to work for JPL), and there
  always seemed to be a pretty large gathering of NASA scientists at this event. JPL-ers are a pretty fun bunch with a distinct sense of humour; one of them once made a virtual planetarium for us, another let us look through some telescopes at JPL, and yet another was doing work with a 3D lidar scanner connected to a cat foot can in his spare time. The whole maker/hacker scene there excited me. There was a sort of playfulness about scientific discovery that was also very creative. Cross-disciplinary training was encouraged. The first Linux Meetup I attended was by a scientist
  who worked on NASA's OnSight, which is their planetary geology VR device with a hololens. He still joked that "of course you
  of all people would like a language like Haskell". YES.
- But I made friends with a scientist/mathematician there, and we never really went back to that event; instead, we hung out
  every Thursday, and he encouraged me to go to grad school. He's still a strong mentor and advocate for me today. So I guess
  I'm this weird film-school electronics/camera technician concept design computer scientist girl now.

## I consider myself a maker

- It's weird when people tell me today that I can't do robot things because I work in programming languages research,
  because between 2008 and 2017-ish, all I did was robot-related tech stuff, hardware and soldering (I worked as an electronics and high speed camera technician for a good 8 years), and somewhere between 2014 to 2017, 
  I was also painting and drawing and learning 3D modelling. 
  I always thought that to be able to express an idea, it would
  benefit a person to learn those tools. But anyways, I spent some time learning some creative tech stuff, 
  either through exoskeleton stuff, 3D modelling,
  mentoring students, being part of hobby robotics groups such as SV-ROS, etc. In California, there is a lot of that,
  and people are intellectually curious in general, so you get a lot of people who pick up a machine shop class just
  to gain the skills for a thing they're trying to build. I miss that freedom these days. I used to be a part of a hackerspace
  in downtown LA that would do everything from large-scale 3D printing, machining, welding, woodworking, and architectural
  robotics used on parametric modelling node-based programming. Oh yeah, and sometimes there would be charcoal drawing
  in there, too, and I would attend 72 hour long drawing events, where people would stay up for 72 hours and live on nothing
  but coffee and the models would come in and pose and we would draw them and listen to music, which was often a dj live-coding! 
 
## Somehow that ended up in a Space thing
- I segued from architectural parametric modelling node-based programming into committing to learning about robots 
  fully around 2014. I attended a school in which my professors were actually working on the Mars 2020 rover. It was a pretty
  wild experience, to be honest. I also made friends with a guy who programmed robots in a dialect of Lisp, but I've lost
  touch with him. 
  
- Many years ago, I had the opportunity to do a workshop at JPL. However, to get there, we had to write a proposal
  and make several designs for possible Mars robots that might work for the 2020 mission. 
  
## At the time
- I was in love with the 3D modelling programme Rhino (which is used moreso by architects and product designers; a guy who introduced me many years ago to the technology now works for FAANG), at the time, so I used it to do quick mock-ups and designs for
  these, and thought of drones that might fit in a quadrant design with rotors and drills and that would recharge 
  on the larger rover. In retrospect, maybe it was pretty silly to expect the smaller drone to also have a drill,
  because that would use a lot of power, but it's still a fun project to go back and look at, and I did end up
  at the workshop, after all, scoring a perfect score on my project. 
  
## Here are some of the models I found from my proposal.
- These are from 2016. 

## This is the original wireframe CAD drawing
<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas005.png" width="500">

<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas004.png" width="500">

<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas001.png" width="500">

<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas002.png" width="500">

<img src="/images/NCASRobot/ncas006.png" width="500">
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