iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

.lol has been a real domain all along too

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Passed the time this weekend making napkin rings.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This is what lets you in when you ring the intercom.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There’s yet another layer to be invented for operating systems that makes user tasks/workflows central instead of apps. Users must keep track of apps, data, configuration to produce something… Much of that cognitive load could be outsourced to an OS-wide layer.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

“I wasn’t being messy. I was creating challenging test scenes for stereo depth algorithms.” This excuse is distributed under MIT license. Permission is hereby granted to use it with family and/or room mates.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Tweaked the depth model to output a confidence map. Now you can set a confidence threshold and dubious pixels in the depth map come as nan (shown as pitch black in video). Useful in noisy scenes (e.g. poor lighting) when the downstream system doesn’t handle noise well.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Mino will ship with a depth perception module. At 10 Hz, it only utilizes 25% of the GPU, so you can run other AI modules on the robot, like the speech-to-text or the LLM.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Mino now will ship with an LLM module. Your robot app can interact with the LLM via ROS 2 actions. Here's an example query. The output of the LLM is received as action feedback as it gets generated. The final output is passed back as the action's result. Arrr!

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Not Claude, not ChatGPT, not Gemini. Do not make compliance decisions (FCC, CE...) for your hardware product based on AI output alone. Compliance is a high-risk domain and, unlike software, it is not verifiable. No agent has tools to validate a hypothesis for your product. 🧵

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

The budget for this film was $0 and a half-eaten sandwich. Watch your back, Hollywood. No, seriously, the robot is showing emotions based on what it hears.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

67 TOPS of friendship coming soon.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

This went really well! Spoke to an expert today who went over the design with me, identified compliance risks, proposed mitigations and shared first-hand experience of lab tests. Best two hours spent. The path forward is clearer now.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Any compliance experts in the room that have experience with consumer product certification (CE, FCC...)? DM me please. I'll pay for your time.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Mino is ready for production with the Jetson Orin Nano and a power jack that enables it to carry a power bank. Now entering the uncertain... <dramatic music> regulatory zone.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

What’s wrong with the world today? If the FCC scare wasn’t enough, NVIDIA increased prices across the Jetson family due to memory prices. The models powering Mino, the Jetson Orin Nano and Jetson Nano, are now 60% and 101% more expensive, respectively.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Mino checks all the boxes for “advanced robotic device” in the new FCC ban on foreign robots, except for its weight. As of now, even with batteries, Mino is way under 4.4 lbs, so it is NOT impacted by the ban (phew!).

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Robotics researchers in the US, how does the ban impact you? Are there American humanoids that can compete with Chinese brands on price?

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

The Jetson Orin Nano is less tall than the Jetson Nano, so we can use the lower-profile casing, better suited to carry a power bank. The one in here gives a few hours of action with the Orin maxed out in Super mode (25W). The test trajectory works fine despite the extra weight! (video in comments)

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I love this timeline. My 3rd-party encoder disks did not do well in some robot units due to chassis and optical sensor tolerances, so I made my own. Resistant to all that. More fabrication cost, at 10 disks/(hour*printer), but it abstracts away that part of the assembly line.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

OG pixel artists at the British Museum

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

The Jetson Orin Nano fits like a glove.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Just designed this holder that lets you attach the camera flat cable extenders to the back of the robot's head. The extenders isolate the camera connectors and cables from any tension due to the head's bearing.

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Reposted by Nacho Mellado

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

moultano.wordpress.com

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You

An atlas of the vibrance of the real world

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Yesterday, these brilliant high school students learned how to hack into a Mino robot! They care about price, so I'm optimizing memory usage to smooth the experience with the inexpensive Jetson Nano. A Jetson Orin Nano will still give you the premium experience, though.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Turns out you can fry a Jetson Orin Nano dev kit with the right (wrong?) short. Luckily, the availability issues they had a year ago seem resolved. Got a new one from Amazon in less than 24h. For more than those $250 that Jensen announced though.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Maker friends, a big PCB manufacturer reached out to sponsor my projects. Is this common? Interested in your experience with these sort of deals.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Turns out we could have been 3D-printing overhangs at 90 degrees all along with the right slicer. Links to paper and code in comments. Video credit: Janis Andersons.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Fellow makers, who spends 15+ minutes every now and then raiding the lab to find a lost screw driver? 🙋🏻‍♂️

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

It wasn't that long a day if you end it slashing 50% of model loading time.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

One code base that builds on jetson nano and jetson orin nano and i love it. That's Mino's software stack.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

My project is at that point when bugs in one robot come from other robots in the network. Turns out I did a bad job configuring DDS and it costed me 1 day of debugging. Who could have imagined that turning on the power in my lab had started a Jetson somewhere out of sight.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Folks, after seeing people having issues to recall the robot's name, I'm giving it a more human-friendly name. HF1 is now Mino. It will be sold by my brand-new company, Min Robotics.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Everyone talking about the dunning-krueger of managers turned swes with ai, and nobody talking about that of swes turned managers. No, throwing n agents at a problem does not automatically solve it n times faster. Brooks’ law still applies.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

If dealing with ai slop wasn’t enough, we now have to suffer ceo slop.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

We’re genetically programmed to belong to a group, which is not necessarily conducive to finding truth.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Good hardware is nothing without good software, so I’ve been heads down coding a module system that will ship with the robot. There’s motion, speech, camera, behavior, bridge… Each module is a container, which makes the dependency hell tractable. Modules communicate via ROS2.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

It was energizing to be in the room with so many entrepreneurial, inquisitive souls building careers around making. I don’t want my legacy to be just products.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Si estás en Madrid, pásate a escuchar a Ignacio hablar sobre IA, robótica y exploración espacial. Servidor participará en el panel de discusión posterior.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

If you're in Madrid, come to listen to Ignacio talk about AI, robotics and space exploration. Yours truly will participate in the discussion panel afterwards.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Currently having very little patience with hyped ai salespeople, wannabe sociopathic ceos and the attention economy in general.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Some of my most productive days as a software engineer end up with zero lines of code written.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Does deep tech just mean hardware now?

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

My robot runs “trainware”.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Prioritizing robot features today as launch date approaches. Project has endless possibilities and I’ll continue creating more features after shipping to early backers. Want an affordable robot you can learn from and build upon? This one’s for you. Bio or contact for more info.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

What are the slots and circles on the lid of the HF1 robot? If the internal cells do not give you enough run time, these simple mechanism enables you to power the robot with virtually any 12V-19V power bank. Here's how you attach the power bank ⬇️

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