I just joined the forum and thought I would say hello. After some decades of working as a mainly non-technical engineer in the oil industry, I recently hung up my excel spreadsheets and decided to jump back into the making-stuff-and-getting-dirty arena.

I am retraining to enter the robotics field, learning everything I can about programming, electronics, AI, bla bla etc, and also have been putting myself together a decent electronics and machining workshop.

For the latter, I am looking at buying some warco gear, and my dear old dad has done a fantastic job of completely making over a rather ramshackle, more than half century old shed, with good stout bench and original vice (still works brilliantly).

The aim is to make my way through the workshop practice series books I have and make the additional tools in those, and then move onto trying my hand at all manner of things thereafter.

Looking forward to chatting

Thanks David! Seems like a great resource

"Better looking at it, than for it", good advice!

Thanks, and good to be here

Hi Bob

Thanks, I really appreciate that. Were you in the North Sea?

Career change is a scary thing to do for sure. I had been trying to change discipline within my company for some time, and though I was getting a trickle of jobs, a few opportunities spread out over 3 years just wasn't turning into a set of skills and a new career path. Then the downturn really bit, everyone was laying off people, and the refrain of "lower for longer" became a more scary version of the past peaks and troughs. That was also the time I started falling back in love with mechanical design, electronics / arduinos and the like. Robotics kind of sprang out of that, but I know I have a very steep learning curve ahead of me. Finding it all to be extremely interesting helps a lot!

Glad to hear your son is doing so well with the pilot training, and that BMI are giving him a seat. I am a big fan of flight simulation and briefly considered doing pilot training too after a couple of PPL lessons. Not enough cash sadly!

Can't say as I miss getting on those super pumas either!

There is some fascinating stuff going on with deep learning and neural nets right now with grippers too. A bunch of guys got together and set up something like 50 robots, all continually making grip attempts on multiple objects, with the same gripper. It learned that angling the gripper in certain ways, or moving the part to one side and coming at it from another angle, or pinching a corner rather than the centre of the body, would lead to a successful grip. Much like a human would. Using 50 robots and sharing the data across them all, they were able to produce an astoundingly effective "gripping dataset" that allows them to pick up a huge range of objects without needing a specialised gripper. Its amazing what they have been able to do with it.

Probably wouldnt want to do that with heavy car panels, but is great for small items. The Amazon Challenge throws up new technologies like this too.