Hello!
Purdue Hackers is back in your inbox! You’re receiving this email because you’re someone we want to stay in touch with. This is the second edition of the Purdue Hackers Bits Newsletter, where we share what our students have been working on :)
Bit 0000: Special! Interview with Bipedal Robot tinkerer, Hayden!
Hayden, a freshman who joined us at Purdue Hackers this year, has been working on quite the project since last May: a fully autonomous, neural network driven bipedal robot!
The robot, once completed, will weigh about 50 pounds and stand up to 1.3 meters tall. It runs ROS 2, is made out of mostly 3D printed or CNC’ed aluminum and computes everything needed on its own device (making it autonomous)! It features powerful quasi-direct-drive motors with the aim of not only walking but jumping and climbing stairs. The robot’s locomotion is entirely driven by neural networks, allowing it to walk and adapt to its environment on the fly, all running on the onboard NVIDIA Jetson. Hayden has been simultaneously constructing the robot, training it through IsaacLab, and running simulations of the robot to ensure functionality! Just a single iteration of the walking policy took over 12 hours of training time on his own personal desktop.
Q: What inspired you to take on this project?
Hayden first got the idea when he saw an NVIDIA keynote presentation showcasing Disney’s BDX droids; small, walking, chirping, seemingly ‘magical’ robots inspired by Star Wars, entirely built on NVIDIA hardware (see here)! It made little noises, had ears, and reacted to its surroundings.
Being that Disney’s robots pushed $15,000, and were not available for sale, he set out to build his own version for much cheaper! His current design is based on and dimensionally accurate to Disney’s, but everything inside is completely his own, including the code, but runs on the same computer!
Q: What's your goal a year from now?
Hayden doesn’t have a concrete end goal in mind. To him, this project is a gift that keeps giving, something that can always have new features added to it! For example, over the next 5 years, it could gain features like face/voice recognition or the ability to map out and memorize physical areas it visits. For this year, he aims to achieve fully autonomous operation, basic locomotion, ability to accompany him in public spaces, make decisions, express emotions, and recognize the environment it is in (i.e. Hayden’s dorm). This project is essentially an ever-expanding platform!
Q: How much have you learned on the go and how did you know beforehand?
Hayden, being a freshman, has had to primarily rely on information outside of his regular classes. As a kid, he started programming to make Minecraft mods for him and his friends. He built a solid foundation in programming, and later expanded into electronics Junior year of high school. As part of his physics class, he was in charge of the sensor suite and active stabilization system for a high-altitude weather balloon, and got an initial taste for hardware and electronics. In his Senior year, he and a friend built a 1.4m wingspan VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) drone, which further solidified his interests in these sorts of projects.
After that, he dove head first into this robot. Hayden has had to pick up on all sorts of new information, software, and technology to bring all the pieces together. Overall, building projects one after the other helped him quickly acquire the skills for cooler and cooler things to hack together!
Q: What has been your favorite failure from this project?
Recently, Hayden’s motors were not responding to the onboard computer and running out of options, he brought it into Bechtel to get some help. When the employee was testing the voltage, he bridged the power terminals on one of the motors, melting his multimeter and spraying the liquid metal all over!
Hayden later talked to a community from the motors’ company, sent over frames of data via Discord, found out it was in a fault mode (a firmware lockout that stopped them from responding to commands to protect the hardware), and received information on how to reset the fault.
Another time, he forgot to save the motor’s zero position, and when he went to home the robot, it violently spun the leg with its entire force, shearing it clean off. Up to that point, he hadn’t set any torque limits, and he learned his lesson the hard way! As the robot weighs ~50 pounds, it needs roughly 60 newton-meters of torque in its knee and hip joints to comfortably walk and jump. For comparison, video game racing wheels can break a driver's wrists with just 12 newton-meters!
Q: How has your involvement in Purdue Hackers contributed to the project?
Hayden initially found out about Purdue Hackers because he needed a soldering iron, so he popped by Bechtel on a Friday night. Soon enough, our dear president Ray came up to him and said “This is sick!” He asked him what he needed from Purdue Hackers, offering tools and money. Hayden has since received a few hundred dollars in grant money from Purdue Hackers and suddenly found himself immersed in this community of makers and doers.
Hayden remarked that at home, all of the momentum was on him; he was simply working on it when he got time, and that was the end of the story. But now, within Purdue Hackers and Purdue at large, people know about the project, and as he works on it, they check up on him. He generally works on it Tuesdays, Thursdays, and throughout the whole weekend, working up to 10-15 hours per week, but suddenly there are people expecting him to see it through which adds extra momentum. He has also met some people at Hack Night who were familiar with a couple of issues he was having and helped him out!
He always checkpoints at Hack Nights, so the desire to show progress every Friday night provides him with extra motivation! He describes it as a peer group of dedicated, smart individuals doing everything they can to see their projects come to life, all in a creative and technical atmosphere.
Bit 0001: A new home at HIVE
Earlier this semester, we moved into the Hub for Innovation, Ventures, and Entrepreneurship (aka the HIVE), Purdue’s brand-new coworking space for founders! With Hack Night attendance reaching the 90s or low 100s, we wanted to move to a bigger space with more amenities, seats, a bigger makerspace... et voilà~
Here are some photos of our new place!
Bit 0010: Latest Ships
Here’s what our hackers have been building since last edition!
a second lied for teto and piano |
✦ Pixel Fishing — Cozy fishing game inspired by @egg's personal website workshop
✦ MacID — Open-source app bringing Face ID unlock to macOS, plus blog post
✦ ghostpost — a Discord bot to cross-post videos
✦ studydeck — Quizlet replacement built for studying
✦ Domine — macOS utility splitting stereo audio tracks across two separate Bluetooth speakers
✦ Purdue Hackers Merch — Redesigned boutique site with archive layout, mobile enhancements, and preorder notifications
✦ qr.purduehackers.com — Revamped Purdue Hackers QR code generator
✦ nino-editor — Web demo for an in-house text editor four years in development
✦ habiboi, neverending weekend - courtyard — Collaboration track released on SoundCloud via sleepy tapes 7
✦ 2048 AI — Interactive visualizer featuring imitation and reinforcement learning models playing 2048
✦ Music & Crate Digging — Live playback telemetry, music history, and recommendations from a self-hosted Plex server
✦ Sketch Intent — iPad app enabling direct sketching input to Claude
✦ mooboard — Decorative ESP32-powered ambient light board
Want to see more ships? Check out: https://ships.purduehackers.com/
For even more, visit our Discord! (https://phack.rs/discord)
Bit 0011: Intro to Rust Workshop
Earlier, Arhan hosted our Intro to Rust Workshop. He taught beginners the basics of Rust like ownership, borrowing, and how its trait system enables compile-time polymorphism, allowing people to write flexible, reusable code without slowing down their programs!
Bit 0100: Personal Website Workshop
Amber held a personal website workshop where club members let their creativity run wild. Attendees developed their very own aesthetic, personalized Neocities sites (including an entire fishing game in one)!
Bit 0101: Partner Events
Sentry Lunch & Learn
Jackie Magno AMA
Neuralink Tech Talk
Fireside chat with Daniel Stenberg
Bit 0110: Art Circle
Starting this week, we’ve begun setting aside dedicated time and space for hackers to draw and make art together! Here are some of the things we worked on this hack night!
Upcoming events
- Hack Nights every Friday!
Our ask:
Help us grow Purdue Hackers!
If you know a great company, founder, alum, faculty member, or ambitious student we should meet, we would really appreciate an introduction! We’re always looking for people who want to recruit highly talented and creative students, run interesting events with us, or help fund Hack Nights, equipment, microgrants, and ambitious student projects.
Many of the best things Purdue Hackers have done started with someone in this network saying, “you two should talk.” Let’s keep it up!
And if you haven’t been to a Hack Night in a while, come visit us, Fridays at the HIVE at 8:00pm :)
With 💛,
Ved
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