iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Putting a project on Kickstarter is like waving a steak in front of a wasp nest: Kickstarter impersonators sending fraudulent links, famous founder impersonators offering sketchy services, verbatim copies of a message from different identities to "know more"...

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

Fascinating that we can recycle 3D-printed parts into new filament at home. Products and video by www.3dpany.com

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Make Mino's day: join the Kickstarter campaign. www.kickstarter.com/projects/min... Super-early-bird 50% discounts will not last long after launch. Click "Notify me on launch" to increase your chance of getting one. (dog talk, I know, can't help it) #robotics #maker #DIY #JetsonOrinNano

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Ran out of this marvel that a friend brought straight from Colombia. Back to living like a mortal.

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Nacho Mellado @uavster.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Kickstarter pre-campaign is out! Subscribe to get notified when the campaign launches in a few days and get an early-bird discount on your Mino robot. www.kickstarter.com/projects/min...

kickstarter.com

Coming soon: Mino: hackable smart robot

Develop intelligent robotics applications with Mino's out-of-the-box capabilities, the ROS 2 ecosystem and 67 TOPS of AI compute.

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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

This paradigm is compatible with agents. There already exist apps that enable human-agent collaboration. Let the OS expose an MCP server for this new layer and also agents could be creating workflows that humans could understand, observe and participate in.

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

We have workarounds. Per-workflow desktops, user accounts, automation scripts… but, by not having that layer in the OS, we’re missing out. I want to create a “Sell idea” workflow, click it and have apps, config, data set up for me. Click a state and pick up where I left off.

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

Before everyone shouts “agents!”, this goes before agents. It’s the steering bar before self-driving: a human moves it through a steering wheel; the self-driving system moves it with a motor. Both have it easier than turning each wheel separately. System stays accesible to both.

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

If I want to sell an idea, I use a presentation app, a style configuration, image creation app, browser for research, app to mail presentation… Then I switch to other things and, when I want to sell another idea days later, the workflow is gone: apps closed, configs changed…

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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

Honestly, didn’t expect it would pick anything at all with the lights off, but…

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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

The video above are debug images streaming over wifi to a linux vm running on a mac, so it's not really representative of the true latency of the depth image, whose median was 45 ms at 640x360.

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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 · 16/09/2026

Good thinking. They’re both part of the action mechanism in ROS 2. Clients must be ready to handle aborted actions and servers must be able to handle cancellations.

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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

Instead: -Locate truth first: applicable directives/standards, full text. If AI assists, check thoroughly, make the grounding strong. -Upload truth as context -Know your design inside and out; be explicit about details -Check output before branching conversation -Consult expert

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

Even if the true alternative is known to the LLM, it cannot reason well about how the standards impact your design. It models really well the language in which designs, standards and lab results are expressed, but it models the physics behind neither.

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

LLMs will explain whatever they distilled from forums or any public secondary sources. Of course, sounding super confident. Since they don't know the true alternative, agents will not even mention it to you for consideration.

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

The standards are gated behind paywalls. LLMs will spit tests and measurements they learned from indirect sources. Often times, these things will be incomplete or won't even apply to your product. They may be close, but compliance requires spot-on.

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

Lots of regulations may apply. Directives reference other directives, docs on how to implement directives are separate. These reference standards for machine types. Everything is amended every few years. Agents fail at discovering this complex, scattered graph accurately.

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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

Yes! Speech-to-text->emotion classification->head trajectories.

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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

It’s hard to set a preorder price with this Jetson price swings. Considering to sell only the robot and let folks buy the Jetson separately from their distributor of choice.

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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

“As of now”, it’s not impacted. Not implying that it could gain weight.

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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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