Building a Quadruped Robot (with an airsoft gun)
I designed and built a quadruped robot dog from scratch this summer for a 'Mech Warfare' airsoft battlebots competition.
Erik Schluntz
Engineer & Entrepreneur
Latest posts
Replacing my Right Hand with AI
Breaking my hand forced me to write all my code with AI for 2 months. I'm never going back.
Designing Bridges with Pytorch Autograd
I used automatic differentiation in PyTorch to optimize bridge designs by solving a system of equations. Yes, you can use PyTorch for things besides neural networks :)
Lasercutting Projects
A collection of furniture / art projects I worked on during my sabbatical using a Glowforge laser cutter.
Automating 1/2 of my typing with generated shortcuts
Compress now has 1,400 stars on github! Shortcuts are autogenerated from analyzing 6 months of my typing...
How To Raise Your First Seed Round
Many of my friends and employees at Cobalt have asked me what fundraising is like and what the first steps are to start a company. I’ve written this post to help demystify some of the process based on my experience raising 5 rounds over my career (Seed through Series C with Cobalt Robotics and Seed for Posmetrics (YC W13)). I hope many more people will start their own companies in the future and…
Refinance your Tech Debt
Credit Card Tech Debt vs Mortgage Tech Debt People online talk about “tech debt” as a universal evil that heroic engineers must fight against Product to prevent, but just like real debt, the story is more complicated. Tech Debt Technical Debt is the idea of reducing work now to finish a project sooner, in a way that will create more total work later. This can occur in many different flavors —…
Podcast: Taking Elevators, Robot Body Language, and Advice for Startups
I was recently featured on the Sense Think Act podcast with host Audrow Nash.
Premortems Will Keep Your Code Alive
Premortems and Postmortems Two crucial tools for writing code when the stakes are high, like managing our fleet of over 100 robots at Cobalt Robotics. This is part 2 of a 2 part series on High Stakes Code. See Part 1. Premortems Premortems are remarkably quick, and have saved my team from making bad mistakes many times. What’s a premortem? Before deploying new code, ask yourself and at least one…
Writing High Stakes Code (At A Startup)
Thoughts on how to write code when the stakes are high or human safety is involved, but you don’t have the budget or timelines of NASA. Most of these are from safely building a fleet of over 100 robots at Cobalt, advising startups who programmatically move money/stocks, or my time at SpaceX. I’ll try to make this general for writing software in any high stakes situation, in any startup, and focus…