03 Jan 2026 - nzge
keep it simple stupid (kiss). a term i first heard about through my high school robotics team. it was parroted as a funny meme phrase, the inspiration behind our team name. a phrase that our coach brought to attention. but as i become more of a competent engineer (whatever that means), this phrase is becoming more relevant. i will try to give examples in my ‘career’
stewart platform build. the approach is almost like a software project leverage various frameworks with multiple abstraction/integration layers. it is tempting to scale and complicate, to create this flashy shiny cool novel project. using ros for communication, multi-staged communication. with a raspbi to host web server.
capstone project. my concept involved multiple servos, mechanical, hardware and software complexity. in the end my team, perhaps smarter than me, came up with a four bar linkage that worked almost flawlessly for our given task (a delivery robot)
considering how advanced ai has become, it seemingly can’t grasp this this crucial engineering concept (especially considering ironically, the tools that birthed ai presumably was created by competent engineers, hence you would think they tried to program in this thinking into it. perhaps that is not so straightforward of an implementation though).