Five sensors we're leaving room for
Petting, weather, sentry wake, battery health, precision docking — a $56 expansion BOM, provisioned in rev 1, populated in rev 2.
The complete record
Build log
The dock: IR homing, spring contacts, no Qi
Three IR receivers triangulate the dock beacon, cliff sensors double as line followers, and wireless charging got voted off the island.
Killing the wire rat's nest
Every past Pi/Arduino project ended in a harness hairball. This time the fix is a custom spine PCB: six tidy runs, everything else plugs in.
Brain suggests, spine decides
One UART link between the Ventuno Q brain and the STM32H5 safety spine — with a dead-man heartbeat so a crashed brain can't drive the droid into a wall.
Wheel rev 1: 110 mm of split-TPU attitude
Two-piece beadlock rim, chevron tread that bridges the tire seam, and a Bobby portrait embossed on the cap. One test print before the other three.
Hello, Josh: meet Bobby
The mission, the $1,000 budget, and the architecture in one page: a friendly droid with a Linux brain and a microcontroller spine that can always say no.